Blog posts
In-store marketing and outdoor advertising are traditionally seen as brand advertising targeted for broad audiences, with wide reach but difficult to measure. In today’s market the big, global brands and suppliers struggle with small and agile local players, who benefit from their better understanding of local consumer behaviour. Ecommerce and direct-to-consumer business models changed buyer behaviour for good and is also changing the dialogue they have with brands. From the advertiser's perspective, measuring campaign performance is made even more challenging by “the death of cookies”.
The role and importance of retail as an advertising platform will increase in the future, as it is able to use its own rich data to help brands find the right message and reach well-defined target groups.
The world’s largest retail chain Walmart is a forerunner, who does not settle for second place. With the launch of WalmartConnect in January 2021, they announced to become a major media player and become one of the world's leading advertising platforms alongside Google andFacebook - leveraging their own vast customer data.
Covering more than 4,500 stores representing 170 000screens, the digital display network connects consumers to brands at the point of purchase, as a seamless part of overall digital communications.
“We’ve built a substantial business that can serve clients in a way no one else can – as a closed-loop omnichannel media company.”
—Janey Whiteside, Chief Customer Officer, Walmart Connect.
It is this broader, targeted reach across different channels leveraging customers’ buying behavioural information that creates a competitive advantage for retailers over online or mobile advertising giants.The ability of a retailer to encounter a consumer throughout the entire consumer journey by leveraging the shopper insight they gather for improved customer experience while serving the advertisers is transcendent. Target, Kroger, CVS and Walgreens, among others, are already building a similar model in the United States.
In Finland and Nordics, Doohlabs is helping major retail chains, such as S-group with over 1800 outlets and retail station chainST1 with over 1300 service stations to monetise their in-store audiences with automated media sales and targeting engine.
Measuring the impact on business results plays a strong role in the future of advertising and in-store advertising in no exception. The modelling of impact or “attribute-based modelling” refers to sharing the value of conversion over a multi-channel network, spreading it evenly throughout the buying process. There has been a lot of discussions about measuring the effect of digital advertising end-to-end, but due to various fragmented ecosystems this work is still in progress.
However, In-Store media and retailer’s channels, as well as “closed” advertising ecosystem based on own data, already enables completely new measurability from the advertiser’s point of view, allowing the impact in all parts of the chain to be modelled on a campaign-by-campaign basis from the first contact till the point of purchase. This is why we at Doohlabs believe, that retailer’s own in-store media will be the choice of more and more advertisers in the future.
The closed-loop will create an omnichannel advertising environment where customer behaviour is continuously measured and performance is developed actively, explained in the image below.
With the Doohlabs platform, retailers are able to provide premium point-of-purchase audiences - audiences, that are based on actual shopper data and insight. And this can all be done while protecting privacy and improving consumer experience.
When campaigns are run, the loop is closed by targeting in-store audiences and providing campaign data to be combined with actual purchase data by retailer, for the advertisers benefit.
This is why we feel that retailers first party data will be the most relevant targeting asset for marketers in a post-cookie, GDPR-driven world.
