Fast-Growing In-Store Retail Media Needs Measurability

Retail media has been a headline topic at marketing events for several years now, and its prominence continues to grow daily. Initially, retail media focused predominantly on e-commerce, while in-store retail was often viewed as a separate domain.

However, this dynamic has shifted significantly. Major players in brick-and-mortar retail have entered the retail media arena, transforming their vast store networks into highly appealing advertising platforms.

To fully unlock the potential of an in-store retail media network, retailers need an advanced platform, such as Doohlabs.

>> Image: The Elements of an In-Store Retail Media Platform >>

With the Doohlabs platform, you can:

• Create audiences using retailer data.
• Package these audiences into sellable media products.
• Deliver audience-targeted ads at the screen level within stores.

For retail media to deliver its full value, measurability is key. Retailers need to track how well advertised products perform, identify the factors influencing sales, and provide advertisers with actionable insights. This allows for refined messaging to better engage target audiences.

Doohlabs and Cyreen have partnered to help retailers and advertisers maximize the benefits of retail media. Together, they provide tools and expertise for measuring and understanding attribution in in-store retail media.

How In-Store Measurement Works Today

Until recently, retailers have relied on two primary methods to approximate the effectiveness of in-store advertising:

1. Comparing Sales Across Stores
   Analysts compare sales in a store running a campaign against another store without the campaign. By examining which store performs better, they try to infer the campaign’s impact.
2. Comparing Sales Over Time
   This method looks at sales before and during a campaign within the same store. The difference in sales is used as a rough indicator of the campaign’s effectiveness.

While useful to some extent, both approaches have significant drawbacks. These methods rely on overall store sales to estimate the impact of ads. However, only a fraction of shoppers in the store see specific ads, making it hard to attribute sales changes directly to the campaign.

Compounding the problem, external factors like weather, shelf layout, and varying shopper demographics can skew results. Depending on the stores or time periods used for comparison, the perceived impact can differ dramatically, creating uncertainty around the true effectiveness of campaigns.

Why Accurate Measurement Matters

Physical retail has long operated in the dark when it comes to understanding in-store customer behavior. Unlike online platforms, where every click and conversion is tracked, in-store shopping remains a black box for both brands and retailers.

Without reliable data on campaign performance, it’s challenging to justify ad spend, optimize strategies, or create meaningful shopper experiences. That’s where Cyreen comes in with a revolutionary approach to measuring retail media campaigns with precision and clarity.

The Cyreen Advantage: Bringing Precision to Retail Media

Imagine walking into your local grocery store. You grab a shopping cart and approach a digital screen. A nearby sensor anonymously recognizes your cart and triggers an ad tailored to that moment. This interaction is recorded: a specific shopping cart was shown a specific ad.

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At the end of your trip, when you check out, another sensor captures your purchase data. By connecting these two datasets—ad exposure and purchase behavior—Cyreen achieves what was once only possible online: a precise 1:1 measurement of ad effectiveness.

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This approach enables us to answer critical questions with confidence:

• Which shoppers saw specific ads?
• Did those shoppers buy the advertised product?
• How does their behavior compare to shoppers who didn’t see the ad (incremental effects)?

With this data, we calculate metrics like conversion rates, sales uplift, and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). Brands, agencies, and retailers can access detailed reports or dive into the results through an interactive dashboard.

The result? Data-driven insights that leave no room for guesswork.

Beyond Measurement: Enhancing Targeting with Customer Insights

Cyreen doesn’t stop at measurement. By analyzing campaign performance, we uncover the factors that drive success and use them to optimize future campaigns. Here's how:

1. Identifying Key Drivers
   Campaign effectiveness is influenced by diverse factors, from time of day and day of the week to weather conditions, promotions, and special events. By analyzing these elements, we determine what makes a campaign successful.
2. Tailored Strategies for Each Brand
   Every product has unique drivers. Our analysis identifies the most relevant factors for each brand, ensuring that campaigns are built to succeed.
3. Optimizing Campaign Execution
   Armed with insights, we adjust campaign playout to minimize ad-waste, allocate budgets efficiently, and maximize shopper engagement. Ads are shown at the right place, at the right time, to the right audience.

With Cyreen’s data-driven insights, advertisers and retailers gain more than just performance metrics—they gain actionable intelligence to refine their strategies and amplify results.

Utilizing Customer Insights with the Doohlabs Platform

The Doohlabs platform leverages data collected by Cyreen for two primary purposes:

1. Campaign Reporting: By integrating Cyreen's data with campaign data, the platform provides detailed reports on campaign performance to both advertisers and retailers.
2. Dynamic Optimization: With insights into which ads and ad versions are performing best, the platform can adjust targeting and messaging in real-time—even while the campaign is still running—to achieve even better results.

>>Image: Closed Loop >>

This creates a closed loop—the true superpower of retail media. The Doohlabs platform excels at automating the processes required to establish this loop, allowing retailers to focus on what matters most in retail media: delivering customer insights and exceptional services to advertisers.

To unleash the full potential of your retail media, you can contact either of the two companies. We’ll be happy to discuss your current status and help make plans for major growth.

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Doohlabs is an in-store retail media platform that helps retailers to add in-store to their retail media mix. We enable audience-based media sales and deliver the targeted ads on an individual screen level in stores to reach the wanted target groups.

Cyreen is a German start-up specializing in the development of AI-based retail media technologies for brick-and-mortar retailers. We connect various data streams such as shopper-, media- and purchase data to generate impactful and data-driven insights for both retailers and advertisers. Thereby, we shed light on in-store customer behavior and media impact in a fully GDPR-compliant way.