Charting retail media’s course with Keith Bryan

Jerrid Grimm (01:13.292)

Keith, welcome to the show.

 

Keith Bryan (01:22.641)

Thank you very much. It’s great to be here, Jared.

 

Jerrid Grimm (01:24.98)

Yeah, I’m excited to have you on here. was telling you when I reached out to you that I have been talking to a few people about retail media networks and it seems like all roads lead back to Keith, right? Like you, you’ve established yourself as a, as an expert in this field. I know you’ve got a lot of experience with it. So props to you. I mean, I had several people that said, well, you should really talk to Keith about retail media networks if you want to get into it.

 

Keith Bryan (01:49.841)

Well, I enjoy all of that except the implications about my age.

 

Jerrid Grimm (01:54.764)

Well, let’s go into your background a little bit and the reason that you know, I was referred to you so many times you spent nearly 20 years or right around 20 years at Best Buy in several roles. But one of those roles was very much focused around Best Buy ads, right? Maybe you can tell us about your your background there at Best Buy.

 

Keith Bryan (02:18.855)

Well, I started at Best by leading some category marketing teams, which are the teams that are, as many people know, are embedded with the merchandising teams while they sit in marketing and they assist with promo planning, events, category marketing strategy, brand category strategy, and things like that. And one of the big teams that I was most associated with was computing. And I distinctly remember,

 

In 2004, about six months in, I was in meetings with big OEMs, with merchants and with the vendor sales team. So it’d be big OEMs. This was in the era of when Intel. Intel was kicking butt with Intel inside. Microsoft was kicking butt with Office and all of their suites and still are, I’d say. so I in those meetings and it occurred to me that half of the conversation was certainly about merchandising terms and conditions that were

 

Jerrid Grimm (03:03.83)

Yeah.

 

Keith Bryan (03:18.647)

outside the purview of any really marketer. But then the other half of the conversations were often about media, but not as though they were really about media. The people that were having the conversations in some ways didn’t know that we were really having conversations about media. And while we still will be, while retailers and brands will continue to…

 

Jerrid Grimm (03:35.157)

Hmm.

 

Keith Bryan (03:44.761)

have negotiations, let’s just call them what they are, and intellectual conversations and growth conversations about whether media is effective. I think that if you fast forward to today, those conversations are really quite intelligent in many ways compared to then. So back then, I said, we’re a media company in denial.

 

Jerrid Grimm (03:57.878)

Yeah.

 

Jerrid Grimm (04:04.534)

Great.

 

Keith Bryan (04:04.867)

And so I started, you know, tossing that phrase around a little bit and just pressure testing it. And the more I pressure tested it, the more true it seemed to be. So to further pressure test my own hypothesis that we could actually come out of denial, I became a merchant director within computing at Best Buy for three years and did, you know, I had the responsibility to lead a multi -billion dollar.

 

Merchant business, but I during that same time built a business plan for what became the Best Buy Media Network now called Best Buy Ads.

 

Jerrid Grimm (04:41.13)

Yeah. And when it started out, it, was it the website specifically or was best buy ads, you know, also in store in retailer? How did you kind of separate those two ideas? Because I mean, it’s, it’s fairly well known that like grocery stores and retailers, the brands that want prominent placement, maybe they buy an end cap. Maybe they, you know, get better shelving. Maybe there’s the, mean, there’s listing fees. Like you said, these discussions are pretty broad, right?

 

wide ranging. So when you first start out with Best Buy ads, was it because of the digital footprint that was coming along or was it everything that Best Buy did?

 

Keith Bryan (05:20.805)

It started as not just online and in store. Our e -commerce business, just like any other retailers, was still going through really, really early innings of growing pains. Where should it be placed? What’s the traffic? Is it a credo? Is it a margin deg? Things like that. you put yourself back in there. So that was going on.

 

Keith Bryan (05:49.447)

But when we launched the actual business plan in the original vision, and I’d say still to today, is not just in store and online, but also offline, offsite, I should say.

 

Jerrid Grimm (06:02.506)

Hmm.

 

Keith Bryan (06:02.643)

And it all anchored back to the customer experience. What is when a customer is shopping for consumer electronics, as opposed to say grocery or, you know, CPG, things like that. What is their journey and where do they go? Back in 2004, and it continues to today. What is the customer journey? What is their omni -channel behavior? You know, these are words that hadn’t really been invented at the time. But it was clear they just needed semantics.

 

Jerrid Grimm (06:20.033)

Yeah.

 

Jerrid Grimm (06:27.979)

Yeah.

 

Keith Bryan (06:33.717)

So that’s one thing is that it was in store, it was online, and I’m talking about advertising just in this context, as well as offsite because people were going to websites even back then to figure out what to buy. The other thing I’d say is though the original vision, I think it still continues to today. It’s that it’s actually a media value proposition that includes content and advertising.

 

Jerrid Grimm (06:45.931)

Yeah.

 

Jerrid Grimm (07:01.601)

Mm.

 

Keith Bryan (07:01.839)

Advertising without context is not very effective, let’s put it that way. Advertising without content isn’t particularly effective. You need engagement and you need both sides of that. And so the original vision was very much about content as well as advertising. So both sides of a media enterprise.

 

Jerrid Grimm (07:09.601)

Ray.

 

Jerrid Grimm (07:18.283)

Yeah.

 

Jerrid Grimm (07:26.816)

Nice. So over this time you have this, you know, they built out this business plan. Hey, we’re going to do this best by ads thing. Turns out we’re a huge media property. We just never really thought of ourselves that way. Or we were in denial. Like you said, that gets launched. This was, I mean, in the last couple of years, all we hear about is retail media networks now. But at this time, was there anyone else that was, that was also doing this where other retailers very interested in it? Or was this, did this feel like a solo mission at the time?

 

Keith Bryan (07:55.387)

Well, the short answer is there were others that were doing it. Even our Canadian team, you know, I think it was after that that Best Buy merged Future Shop and Best Buy into one brand in Canada.

 

So our northern neighbors were doing it to some degree. Walmart was doing it. Target was doing it across town. They had what was called Channel Red. Many of the big retailers were doing this. just each one had a different model and that kind of thing. What I would say is that more often than not,

 

Jerrid Grimm (08:17.076)

Yeah.

 

Keith Bryan (08:36.195)

Back then, it was an outsourced business for those retailers. We started ours at Best Buy from the first dollar, from the first deck, from everything with a very integrated model because we felt that there was a, yeah, even my merchant director experience informed me that we would quickly hit a ceiling if we, and bigger problems if we tried to build this separately.

 

Jerrid Grimm (08:40.395)

Yeah.

 

Jerrid Grimm (09:03.936)

Right. Yeah. And then, you start off, you’re, you’re doing this at Best Buy and more recently you’ve started your own strategy consulting business called Coliseum. Right. So, so how did that parlay? want to get, I, there’s a few things that I want to touch on back from the, Best Buy RMNs, but you’ve more recently moved into this. And one of the areas of your expertise is like helping other retail media networks. So how did that come about? How did, you know, you had a great career going at Best Buy, lots of longevity there.

 

Keith Bryan (09:27.25)

Right.

 

Jerrid Grimm (09:33.772)

and then you decide to strike out on your own. So maybe walk us through that decision and what Coliseum does.

 

Keith Bryan (09:38.983)

Well, a little bit about how I think about these things. You know, at the beginning, it felt very, not isolating, but it was about what I could sort of conceive.

 

Once it started, just like with any entrepreneurial endeavor, you need other brains and you learn far more from others than you do from your own personal echo chamber. And so I enjoy building a fantastic team at Best Buy and I also got a lot of energy from the growth of the retail media ecosystem outside of Best Buy.

 

That was a giant crescendo for me. So in the last few years of my 20 years -ish at Best Buy, I could tell that there was both a personal desire to be part of the broader ecosystem and maximize my impact and learning within that ecosystem. And also, I could sense that there was a need for a bespoke consulting practice that was not made up of, well, let me put it in the positive, that was made up of people that actually had built major parts of the retail media ecosystem. People that were operators, people that had responsibility, led teams, had experienced failure as much as success. And

 

Jerrid Grimm (10:49.885)

Mm

 

Keith Bryan (10:58.835)

I wanted to fill that void. And so I left Best Buy back in November of 23 and got really lucky because I have three other fantastic partners, one in Chicago and two in London.

 

Jerrid Grimm (11:13.226)

Yeah. And what do you guys specialize in? What are you primarily? What’s your, your approach to the market or the clients that you work with?

 

Keith Bryan (11:20.359)

Well, it’s definitely retail media, I would call the sort of the epicenter of commerce media, which is probably the more appropriate term for it with credit cards and airlines and hospitality, which already had a pretty good toehold in this business. If you look at consumer experiences online, you can see it yourself, that there’s a blend of content and commerce and advertising when you’re… So anyway, it’s bigger than just retail, but retail is almost certainly the epicenter of it. It’s where a lot of the best ad tech was conceived and solved problems and that kind of thing. So Coliseum, which is a metaphor for how competitive this space is if you hadn’t figured out the Roman Empire connection there. Hopefully nobody gets executed, but nonetheless.

 

Jerrid Grimm (12:00.79)

Hmm. Yeah gladiator.

 

Jerrid Grimm (12:07.37)

Yeah, thumbs up. Hopefully, hopefully it’s all thumbs up, not thumbs down.

 

Keith Bryan (12:12.413)

Correct, exactly. So it’s this environment of competition and collaboration, I would say. We serve multiple constituents within the commerce media defined broadly. One is, call it supply side, since we’re both in the world of media. So supply side, whether that’s a retailer or a publisher or a non retailer.

 

Demand side, so there are a lot of questions that often through the last 15 years, I would think, wow, if the brands just knew what they could be asking, they can make more of this situation and then add tech. And then finally is private equity and venture capital because we’ve seen just a few things out there that actually are &A activity, but they’re gonna be winners and losers.

 

And I think those of us that have, you my partners and I have 70 years of combined experience shaping the industry, we’ve got a decent perspective on where the winners and losers will be.

 

Jerrid Grimm (13:20.18)

Yeah, well that’s interesting. I mean, and good timing to be in it because it is like it’s one of the two hot topics in advertising. There’s retail media or commerce media and then there I actually like the commerce media to it. It feels broader, right? Retail media. mean, it’s got retail in the name, so that means, OK, well, you have to be a retailer. But we have seen, you know, credit card companies, airlines like, you know, all kinds of different types of brands decide, you know what? We’ve got lots of traffic. We sell stuff on our site, what if we offered, you know, even the simple as like sponsored listings or, some display ads on there. So I think your timing is obviously perfect to come into the space. And I also think in a new space, people need help, right? Like you said, they, they don’t have, you know, 20 years experience building an RMN. They might be, you know, maybe they were in merchandising and then they’ve spun up this retail media network and they’re like brought together a bunch of people internally, but those people may not have all of the experience and background to be able to scale quickly, right? It would take a lot of, like you said, they’d have to go through a lot of mistakes and you’ve already made those mistakes. So you can fast forward them.

 

Keith Bryan (14:27.709)

Well, it made a few. We’ve been on the right side of history in terms of some of the fundamentals like integrated, being integrated with the merchant teams, with the media teams, heavy, heavy partnership and collaboration with finance teams. I can’t underscore that one enough.

 

Jerrid Grimm (14:29.301)

Yeah.

 

Jerrid Grimm (14:47.328)

Hmm. And you said something before that I found interesting was around this idea that, you know, like a retail media network, you have to have advertising and content, right? Because most of these retail media networks, I mean, they’re large shopping sites, right? They’re there have inventory of products. Most products are available for sale. And that’s why people come there. They don’t necessarily come to these retailers to read like a know a thousand word blog post right they came to like find some accessories for whatever it was that they’re buying. There was a big big announcement but I was it maybe a year ago where Best Buy partnered with CNET you know CNET well -known review site looks at all these different products does content right like that’s purposes content that makes it easier for people to decide on what they should or shouldn’t buy and Best Buy does this partnership with it.

 

Keith Bryan (15:34.171)

Right.

 

Jerrid Grimm (15:41.706)

It happened more recently, I think after you left Best Buy. But how did that? I mean, I imagine that it happened before that moment. This wasn’t like an overnight decision with two large companies like this deciding to partner. So maybe maybe give a little color to that. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that partnership and anything you can give us like a behind the scenes of how that came about.

 

Keith Bryan (16:04.691)

Well, I’ll share it in the context of my point of view, not to keep us both safe, because I know enough to get us both in trouble. It’s a really exciting proof of concept that we’re not the only ones, by the way, somewhat at roughly the same time, Instacart.

 

Jerrid Grimm (16:09.617)

That sounds good.

Mm -hmm.

 

Keith Bryan (16:26.501)

announced their partnership with New York Times Cooking and some others. There have been others, but there have been less than five, let’s say, that sort of have made the trades. That is such an early beginning, and I’d call all of this a sign of things to come where…

 

Publishers and retailers, while you could say that they’re fighting over a zero -sum game pool of any given years or moments or quarters ad dollars, that is certainly true. But competition is fantastic. But this is much more of a collaborative, synergistic relationship between retail media or commerce media and publishing.

 

because of a number of things. Each has what the other wants. And even when they have some of the same things, when they come together, literally quantitatively, it’s a one plus one equals three when you think about incrementality. Incrementality of traffic, incrementality of ad dollars.

 

All kinds of things. if, and this is public, you can infer this from what you’ve read from Best Buy, Instacart, CNET, New York Times Cooking and the rest. It often has three facets. One is advertising for sure. The media business, selling advertising. Another one is commerce.

 

And you think about the role that especially, let’s say, a specialty retailers, customers, and specialty publishing have to serve commerce. I’ll come back to that. So commerce is second. And commerce involves things like affiliates and content affiliates and affiliate links on a publisher site.

 

Jerrid Grimm (18:09.088)

Yeah.

 

Keith Bryan (18:21.287)

that can be both a of a module, a shopping module, but also embedded within bonafide editorial. So that industry has grown up a little bit, right? And then the final one is content itself. And the thing I’ll highlight there is that on the commerce front, number two, the second one that I mentioned, while the retailer is closest to the point of sale and has the highest fidelity of data around that sale, there’s no doubt about it.

 

Jerrid Grimm (18:27.691)

Mm -hmm.

 

Keith Bryan (18:47.739)

Everybody knows it. I mean, they’re the point of sale. They’re the merchant of record and that kind of thing. The role of content, which you brought up earlier, is super interesting. And if someone goes to Google and types in some keywords and they get, they’re going to get their sponsored listings on Google, but who’s going to be more likely than not to own the organic listings that are a product still of mostly bona fide, helpful editorial.

 

It’s going to be a publisher, not a retailer. Retailers have to pay to play for the most part when it comes to actual editorial content.

 

Jerrid Grimm (19:17.334)

Yeah.

 

Jerrid Grimm (19:20.587)

Right.

 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They don’t rank. You know, if you’re looking up like best laptops, I, you know, Google doesn’t want to say like, well, you know, who’s got the best laptops just best buy. Like they’re going to look for something where the user can help make a decision a little bit earlier in the funnel. Right. Cause the person is just, they’re curious, right? They, they’re not looking to make a purchase in that second. They’re looking to do a little bit of research, find out what an expert thinks.

 

Keith Bryan (19:45.427)

Yeah, 100 % and the pay to play side of it plays into it. We didn’t bring this up earlier, but one of my responsibilities at Best Buy was also running our media investment teams.

 

And so there are actually a handful of retailers who have that same model where the same executive is responsible for both the retail media business. Think of that as a supply side business, which is obviously super steeped and dependent on media transactions, but also the demand side of that retailer. I won’t name the ones, but.

 

Those of us that had responsibility for both the retail media supply side business as well as the media investment teams understand very well the dynamics within media and how those two areas, supply and demand under one leader can be run very effectively when you integrate them.

 

Jerrid Grimm (20:44.074)

Yeah, it makes sense, right? You understand both sides of the transaction. You understand needs on both sides of it, and you can tie those together easier.

 

Keith Bryan (20:50.759)

That’s right, and this idea to bring it back to your question about publishers, you understand very well when you have both of those jobs, the role that publishers and organic search play in the offsite, if you will.

 

Jerrid Grimm (21:08.04)

Yeah, well, let’s actually go through those three things. So the first one you said was advertising, right? So, you know, there’s an R .N. It has needs and then there’s the publisher, right? That that has needs as well. When it comes to advertising, we’re probably talking about, you know, sponsored listings or display ads. So in that way, does a publisher usually act as an extension of the R .N.’ on -site network, meaning I am a retailer. I’ve got this great dot com website but I have a limited amount of traffic and by partnering with some publishers, I can take my, you know, maybe it’s a co -marketing program from one of my merchants and then I can extend that out to publishers. Is that how you’re thinking about the advertising where a publisher can assist an RMM?

 

Keith Bryan (21:55.109)

Yes, absolutely. And there’s a lot we could unpack there. I’ll try to keep it at the basics. You’ll hear and read a lot about moving up the funnel. Well,

 

The more a retail media network is able to create relationships offsite with the open web publishers on Google social networks, the more they can offer a more like an end -to -end.

 

Jerrid Grimm (22:22.923)

Hmm.

 

Keith Bryan (22:26.117)

integrated media plan to a vendor that is a vendor of the, I’m talking about endemic, know, brands right now, to that brand and serve their needs knowing that from the beginning it’ll be based upon highly qualified audiences because it’s retailer first party data, all the way through reporting that is higher fidelity because of skew level reporting that no

 

Jerrid Grimm (22:32.426)

Yeah.

 

Keith Bryan (22:55.419)

No one other than a retailer can actually provide because they don’t have the receipts. don’t have the data that they need to provide that in most cases. Now, affiliates is actually an interesting one because publishers have always, that’s always been part of how a

 

Jerrid Grimm (23:09.589)

Yeah.

 

Keith Bryan (23:11.291)

an affiliate is actually compensated. So that’s kind an interesting spot that’s interestingly close to a publisher’s DNA. So that’s one of the sort of like shared DNA kinds of things. But generally speaking, you know,

 

Jerrid Grimm (23:19.51)

Mm

 

Keith Bryan (23:25.723)

the more a retail media network can offer not just sponsored products and display on their sites or in -store media, but extend offsite so that they can extend further into the customer journey, the better it will be. Now there are challenges with measurement and things like that that are well documented, but does that get at what you’re getting at?

 

Jerrid Grimm (23:46.272)

Yeah, that makes sense. It’s a, mean, I, my background was from the world of, of advertising. only more recently got into performance marketing, right? So I was always an upper funnel marketer. That was always my world impressions, some engagements, but never really got past like the click. Once the click happened, I felt like my job was done and the performance people took it over from there. What I think is interesting about this, you know, Venn diagram of retail media and affiliate is that both of them,

 

Keith Bryan (24:08.273)

Yes.

 

Jerrid Grimm (24:15.276)

one of their most powerful points is this idea of knowing that a transaction happened, right? Like there’s the, the want to make her quote, which is, you know, I know 50 % of my advertising is working. I just don’t know what 50 % or which half, right? But our men’s do know, Hey, if you’re going to be doing some ads, we know if you’re driving sales, we know if we’re driving it in store, otherwise an affiliate has always been around that idea, like run some campaigns with lots of different partners and you’re going to pay them a commission of the sale. And we’ll track that.

 

Keith Bryan (24:28.274)

Yes.

 

Jerrid Grimm (24:42.732)

So I think there is something in the DNA of retail media networks and the DNA of the affiliate or performance industry that is very closely tied to this unique, you know, it’s called just first party data or transaction data now. But really there’s only a few people in the whole world that know whether a sale happened for a specific product or not. Right. And to me, that’s always like the holy grail of marketing and advertising was, am I doing some stuff and is it driving some business outcomes, some sales at the end?

 

Do you find that RMNs are specifically gaining all this attention because of that factor, because of the idea that they can find out if that all these marketing efforts that they’re paying for are driving sale or is there something else about RMNs that makes them unique?

 

Keith Bryan (25:31.345)

Well, I’m a sample size of one for you right now. And so I also was a corporate lawyer in a prior life. So I feel some responsibility to be intellectually honest. So let’s acknowledge two things. There will always be arguments, debates, analytics around attribution, whether something is correlated or whether causation versus correlation and things like that.

 

Jerrid Grimm (25:34.379)

Yeah.

 

Keith Bryan (26:00.387)

is always going to be the case. It’s sort of where are we right now in time in terms of fidelity. And I do believe retail media is pushing us to a higher fidelity of that, at least for some parts of marketing investment, specifically media, obviously. So that’s number one. The second thing we have to acknowledge intellectually is that

 

Jerrid Grimm (26:13.931)

Hmm.

 

Jerrid Grimm (26:20.288)

Yeah.

 

Keith Bryan (26:26.523)

There is, there was an article in DigiDay just this week about brands viewing to some degree retail media as just the latest flavor of arm twisting that retailers have and the leverage they have in building joint business plans or assorting or space or all those things. This is something also that will be

 

Jerrid Grimm (26:40.138)

you

 

Keith Bryan (26:51.707)

has been happening forever since the beginning of time and will happen forever now. Where is this just another flavor of pay to play from a retailer standpoint?

 

Jerrid Grimm (26:59.946)

Right.

 

Keith Bryan (27:01.841)

What I do believe is that in that regard, and there are plenty of examples out there that even with that dynamic always being to some degree true, it’s a higher level of intelligence now. And people are holding each other more accountable on both sides to provide a real transaction rather than

 

Jerrid Grimm (27:18.911)

Hmm.

 

Keith Bryan (27:31.549)

You know, old school fees and slotting fees and things like that. There are people that understand what they’re talking about and can ask intelligent questions to make sure that that it’s a better conversation than it was before. Because we are going through a transition. It’s no longer. It’s no longer about a Sunday circular. In most cases, it’s no longer about.

 

Jerrid Grimm (27:33.345)

Yeah.

 

Jerrid Grimm (27:44.757)

Yeah.

 

Jerrid Grimm (27:51.062)

Great.

 

Keith Bryan (27:54.149)

Slotting fees especially with for many retailers include especially specialty where Ecom traffic is higher than store traffic But when people go to a store, they are much more highly qualified and intelligent because of their ecom experiences

 

Jerrid Grimm (28:12.33)

Yeah. Well, and I think just the, the fact that it’s on the open web makes this big difference. get it when, you know, if you’re a retailer and you’ve got a big box store of any kind and you have all the customers coming in there and then you have thousands of products vying for position, that’s a fairly exclusive place. And that brand has to, you know, that merchant or product has to play ball, right? Like there’s only so much shelf space.

 

and I want mine to be at this part of the shelf space, yeah, maybe I have to pay a slotting fee or something like that or have a tight relationship or offer a better margin. But once you move over to the open web, it does like democratize it quite a bit because anybody can have a store, right? Anyone can be the sales. So really it’s about, you know, is the audience that is on your site, you know, have a higher intent of making a purchase? Is there a brand halo effect that your brand gets out of being a part of that retailer? So it is an interesting dynamic.

 

Keith Bryan (28:52.957)

That’s

 

Jerrid Grimm (29:07.37)

Yeah, I have heard that before. It’s just like, it’s just another slotting fee on a new place. But I think it’s fundamentally different because because of the dynamic between this isn’t just the only shelf that’s available. There is a lot of shelves on the open web. And in a way, retailers then have to compete with other retailers and other publishers and everything to be able to to bring that brand through to them. Right. There is a sales pitch that’s required on the retail media network side.

 

Keith Bryan (29:34.671)

Absolutely. you know, the thing, one of the things we like to say is that commerce is everywhere because people are everywhere and the technology used to conduct commerce is, I was going to hold my phone up, but is everywhere. And so with commerce being everywhere and people and technology being everywhere, retailers have a new responsibility.

 

Jerrid Grimm (29:40.234)

Hmm.

 

Jerrid Grimm (29:46.721)

Yeah.

 

Keith Bryan (29:59.791)

on behalf of customers and their vendor brands, and that is to enable commerce everywhere.

 

Now brands can, mean, D2C is a real thing, but if you go too extreme in D2C, we’ve got some examples. I’m not going to call them out, but it’s public where some brands have been exclusively D2C and had to go into retail and brands that were more or less exclusively retail tried to go D2C and you can’t be, it’s not a zero sum game. And if you try to stay in one lane completely, not reaching all the customers that you can have.

 

Jerrid Grimm (30:15.371)

Yeah.

 

Jerrid Grimm (30:36.608)

Yeah, definitely.

 

Keith Bryan (30:36.965)

Retailers have to do that. Well, in almost every case, the places where commerce is happening in the open web are ad -supported. And the most effective ads are based upon the highest fidelity data. It’s not always going to be a retailer’s data.

 

Jerrid Grimm (30:49.462)

Hmm.

 

Jerrid Grimm (30:56.0)

Right.

 

Keith Bryan (31:01.093)

And so that’s another place where the back to your earlier question about retailers or retail media networks and publishers, there’s definitely a one plus one equals three there in terms of audience fidelity and incrementality.

 

Jerrid Grimm (31:15.818)

Yeah, I think this makes sense, but I think a lot of publishers are out there. They’re trying to think, where do I fit in? Where do I fit into this retail media network? They’re not like, most of them are editorial sites, right? So like the content sites are doing product reviews and they might be doing gift guides and they might be doing recommendations of all kinds, but they’re not necessarily selling those products. Well, in fact, they’re not selling those products. So I think it’s interesting the way that you’ve laid this out, the three ways.

 

that a publisher can play with the retail media network. The first one is advertising, be an extension of their inventory. The second one around this idea of affiliate or commerce, right? And then the third one around content, which I think is, has always been a very interesting thing because you’re right, retailers don’t really show up as, you know, I’m going to take a recommendation on, on what I should buy. The retailer doesn’t come up first because of course there’s some bias there that’s happening and you want like this editorial source.

 

So with it, let’s go back quickly to that CNET Best Buy viewpoint, right? Not necessarily the details of it, but in what ways do content fill a need for both sides? Like I understand that, you know, someone like CNET is being ranked very high on Google. And so when someone’s searching for new technology X or what should I use for my back to school to buy my kid for back to school, they’re going to rank higher. And then there’s going to be content and products in there.

 

Is there anything that works in the reverse, meaning someone like a Best Buy or a Target or a Walmart or any of those where they would want to have the actual content from those publishers? I think that was a part of the CNET deal and I’ve seen it with Instacart as well. How does that work? Like is there a play for a publisher to actually provide content to the retail media network instead of just traffic?

 

Keith Bryan (33:06.547)

100%. And there in the old days, if a retailer wanted a publisher’s content, it was probably a straight up transaction.

 

Jerrid Grimm (33:15.637)

Hmm.

 

Keith Bryan (33:16.795)

Okay, we know this happened and it’s, it was a legitimate way to bring product ratings and reviews, know, professional reviews of products or customer sentiment or articles about products. And I’m not just talking about specialty like electronics. I’m talking about even gluten -free or low salt or whatever it may be. Those kinds of things have always happened, but they’ve been pretty much a transaction.

 

Now there’s a lot more room for and need, I would say, for a collaborative strategic relationship that involves more thoughtful economics, more long -term relationship building, those kinds of things. And it needs to be scaled. And that’s where AdTech platforms that can help scale these and make it easier for publishers and retail media networks to collaborate. I’m talking about on the content front, because that’s what the question is. So that’s one thing, is that it’s in a new era. So there’s a new opportunity.

 

Jerrid Grimm (34:17.163)

Yeah.

 

Keith Bryan (34:24.615)

to change it from just a transactional, we’ll pay you for some of your content. And now it can be more collaborative and bidirectionally so that retailers can actually bring content from a publisher with a strong brand and high equity in terms of the consumer’s mind into the publisher’s ecosystem, whether it’s in store, app.

 

online, whatever it may be. So that’s one thing. The second thing I would say is that it’s more about media than it is about retail media. With cookies really deprecating organically, regardless of Google’s decision, even before Google had made that decision, the majority of the open web was not covered by cookies.

 

Jerrid Grimm (34:51.701)

Yeah.

 

Jerrid Grimm (35:13.035)

Yeah.

 

Keith Bryan (35:13.875)

Probably 70 % of it on Safari, with ITP, on other browsers, incognito mode. There’s so much open web traffic that is not cookied. In fact, the majority is not. And it’s going to decline to almost a de minimis, immeasurable level over time.

 

Jerrid Grimm (35:17.995)

Mm -hmm.

 

Keith Bryan (35:35.751)

How do advertisers, forget retail media, how do advertisers reach real customers, not bot traffic, on the open web? Well, publishers have an incredible amount of engagement data of multiple flavors, and it’s their first party data about real consumer behavior.

 

So how do we make sure that retail media networks, now back to retail media networks, how do they actually help solve the problem of the open web collapsing on itself?

 

that the broader media ecosystem is having. I hope this is making sense. With made for advertising and invalid traffic, bot traffic and things like that pervading and at an accelerating level, you can read the ANA report about transparency. You can see how up to 70 % of the invested dollar is wasted. Well, publishers with retail media networks can provide a very high fidelity, low fraud ecosystem

 

Jerrid Grimm (36:14.825)

Yeah, yeah.

 

Jerrid Grimm (36:37.846)

Hmm.

 

Keith Bryan (36:41.119)

without cookies that has actually better data than the cookies themselves.

 

Jerrid Grimm (36:45.364)

Right. You take like the understanding that a RMN has of a customer, like they know the customer, they specifically are having the transaction. They might even have a loyalty card. Like they know who this person is on the internet. They could even be logged in at the time. And then you basically have a customer base that you know, then is consuming content in some way, whether it’s on the publisher’s site or, or there is the content that’s shared back onto the RMN site. Yeah, that’s interesting. It’s almost like

 

Keith Bryan (36:51.015)

Right.

 

Jerrid Grimm (37:12.938)

The web is really messy. mean, I’ve been in digital long enough to know that, it’s a really messy place with a ton of bot traffic and a ton of like non -viewable impressions and all the rest of it. But if you can find the actual people on the web, and then you can just make sure that your messaging gets to them and that you’re kind of tracking them or seeing what they’re into, then you don’t have to worry about all of that. Right. You just, you just buy the people and just ignore the bots. Right. But that’s a difficult thing to do. If you’re just trying to hit a third party cookie.

 

Out in the wild.

 

Keith Bryan (37:43.815)

Right, that’s so true. so the publishers are dealing with some of their most valuable inventory being undervalued because it’s not cooked. OK. And you’re dealing with retail media networks and retailers in general or brands in general dealing with open web ROAS problems. And together the retailers and retail media networks and publishers could actually be a massive solution for this because the race to the bottom

 

Jerrid Grimm (37:50.912)

Yeah. Yeah.

 

Jerrid Grimm (38:08.427)

Hmm.

 

Keith Bryan (38:11.443)

on cheap reach is actually not cheap reach. It’s an illusion. If you take out MFA and you take out bot traffic, then actually those low one to $3 CPMs are probably more like five to $7 CPMs because you’re buying a lot of empty calories. so brands and even retail media networks can wonder why they have such, they’re struggling with open web ROAS.

 

Jerrid Grimm (38:25.812)

Yeah. Right.

 

Jerrid Grimm (38:38.891)

in general.

 

Keith Bryan (38:38.961)

If we just use that blunt measurement tool, well, part of the problem is within their capability to fix by working more closely with publishers. And I mean, you can see what’s happening with DSPs trying to create bespoke publisher inventory. It’s happening.

 

Jerrid Grimm (38:48.0)

Yeah.

 

Jerrid Grimm (38:57.654)

Yeah, curated networks, right? Now that it’s a new, and there’s always a new term for it, they’re called curated networks. Now I’m like, that’s the ad networks of like when I started.

 

Keith Bryan (39:01.947)

Yeah, so it’s not just.

 

Keith Bryan (39:06.311)

That’s exactly right. And so you can see that they recognize that this collapse of cookies is a problem that they have to solve. It’s an existential problem and opportunity for DSPs. So they’re trying to fix it too.

 

Jerrid Grimm (39:13.697)

Yeah.

 

Jerrid Grimm (39:21.504)

Yeah. Yeah. This is really interesting. I, I think that, you know, this hasn’t been these RMNs, it’s not a new thing. As you’ve said, right? Like Best Buy ads has been around for, for a well over a decade and you know, Walmart was doing it too. And like you said, it was, what did you call it? Team red at Target or channel red. And now it’s called round L right. So like even it’s gone through a rebranding. It’s been around for so long.

 

Keith Bryan (39:42.205)

Channel Red, they cut,

 

Jerrid Grimm (39:49.45)

And I’ve seen credit card companies do this and I’ve seen airlines do it as well. Do you think, you know, you positioned Coliseum as a, as an advisor in this space. So I’m curious to get your viewpoint. Do you think all brands are going to start their own RMNs? Like every company out there that has, you know, an audience on their website is going to start selling ads to their, their merchants. Or do you think this is more appropriate for, you know, large scale retailers and large scale airlines? What are your thoughts on that? Where’s this going?

 

Keith Bryan (40:20.847)

Well, let’s start here. The hypothesis behind your question is true. It’s yes. Anyone that has first -party data, addressable, scalable first -party data, and has some consumer experience that could be not just high impact but high margin for them is going to think, well, maybe we should have one of these networks.

 

Jerrid Grimm (40:48.822)

Yeah.

 

Keith Bryan (40:50.373)

invariably there will be big enterprises, big brands, big retailers, big commercial establishments outside of retail that can do this and create their own.

 

semi porous walled garden and not really need others other than some ad tech and some third party access points to access the inventory. Then there’s going to be a mid and long tail that’s going to follow a different, you know, a different shape probably that might be a little more collaborative, a little bit more dependent perhaps on ad platforms and networks of the future and that kind of thing. So I think you’re going to, it’s usually an and not an or, and it depends on

 

Jerrid Grimm (41:13.312)

Mm

 

Jerrid Grimm (41:28.074)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

 

Keith Bryan (41:30.621)

It depends on that. I didn’t mean to dodge the question, but it is definitely.

 

Jerrid Grimm (41:33.288)

No, that makes sense. mean, the big ones are going to have direct relationships with advertisers and agencies and they’re going to buy directly from them. Your mid to long tail is going to need to be aggregated in some sort of efficient way, which is usually done through ad tech. mean, I’ve been in ad tech my most of my career and I know that usually what’s interesting is the RMS don’t necessarily, I don’t see them working together. They’re highly competitive.

 

So it’s going to be hard for them to share all this information unless it’s done through an intermediary, which is usually ad tech, same as in affiliate. The reason one of the biggest reasons that companies like impact exist is because the merchant or the advertiser needs to be telling the publisher whether a transaction came from traffic that they generated. But can you imagine them sending all of their sales information to every publisher they work with? Like, here’s all the sales we made and the cookies. It’s impossible. So you need like sometimes you need intermediaries to be able to just translate some information from one party to another that’s in everyone’s best interest anyway. So that’s that’s an interesting way to think about it, where you’re to have these large ones, these large retail media networks that are going to just do their own thing, right? They’re to have their own ad tech and they’re going to have their own relationships. The mid to long tail is going to be a lot broader, a lot more aggregated, probably bought more at once. And what’s interesting about that is this idea of this commerce media. I like the way that you’ve termed that this commerce media, which is just the broader, broader area that isn’t necessarily just a retailer. It involves all these different types of media networks and the publishers that they work with to

 

Keith Bryan (42:50.803)

Thank you.

 

Jerrid Grimm (43:08.96)

to collaborate on advertising and traffic and the rest of it. So it’s a, it’s a super interesting space. think, I think you picked the right time to, to get into like being advisory in this and just, it’s like you, you know, when you write the blog post of your entire career, it’ll look like you, you master planned it, right? It’s going to be like an Elon Musk blog post where like I started best buy ads and I knew that one day I would be the retail media would take off and be the top topic. So I went into an advisory. So I’m looking forward to that blog post.

 

Keith Bryan (43:37.647)

Well, that was maybe too big for me to acknowledge, but certainly I hope our timing was right. What I do think just to throw another idea out there is that what’s going on, the retail media business, the retail media industry is growing faster than retails, comps overall, no matter where you look.

 

Jerrid Grimm (44:00.874)

Yeah.

 

Keith Bryan (44:01.393)

retail media is growing faster than at a macro level or at a micro level is growing faster. It’s also growing faster than media is growing. advertising is growing whether it’s US or international, you can look at IAB data or whatever you want to look at. So what is going on? I would say that yeah, the tide is rising. The water level is rising to some degree.

 

Jerrid Grimm (44:09.812)

Right, right.

 

Jerrid Grimm (44:19.03)

Hmm.

 

Keith Bryan (44:25.895)

But that doesn’t explain all of it. And so far it is rising, it’s not lifting all boats evenly. And some boats are gonna sink. And that’s just the way, that’s life in the world of business, right? So what else is going on? The water is flowing differently. And I would use this metaphor, is that before the Panama Canal, ships had to go around Cape Horn.

 

Jerrid Grimm (44:32.394)

Mm. Yep.

 

Keith Bryan (44:50.483)

And I used to know the stat. I forget it. But let’s say it was 8 ,000 nautical miles of treacherous waters to get from one side of the Americas to the other. Then they built the Panama Canal, which took a lot of time, a lot of money. Some businesses were made, and some businesses were lost. There were winners and losers. At the end of the day, it was a big win. was a big one plus one equals three for the most part, because now the water flowed much more efficiently through Panama and ships could flow through there. And so I think of the supply side and the ad tech side as building essentially a Panama canal with retail and commerce media. And now the demand ships can run much more smoothly from end to end.

 

Jerrid Grimm (45:43.636)

I love this. I love this metaphor actually. makes it because it does make a lot of sense was, you know, the boats, which is the brands had to navigate, you know, around this like messy area and maybe there’s a pirate on this side and maybe this is the right way to go and there’s a storm over here and then you find a more efficient way, which is beneficial for, you know, the shipping companies because they don’t have to go through this like dangerous way either.

 

And the demand, which is, you know, the products that are being moved through. It’s an interesting way. Actually, I think I’ve, think that comes up with the title for this episode. I think it’s going to be navigating retail media. cause I think that’s a really interesting metaphor and an interesting way to put it.

 

Keith Bryan (46:23.879)

Well, thanks. I’m glad you like it. I usually fail with my metaphors, but this one seems to work.

 

Jerrid Grimm (46:29.324)

I feel like this one’s got legs. think this is a good one. I think that’s actually a really good place to wrap it up is around this idea that what’s happening is like a reconstruction of the way that brands and publishers and retail and customers are working together. And the water is just changing and it’s becoming like a more efficient, more direct way to get the job done.

 

Keith Bryan (46:52.039)

Yeah, well, great. enjoyed. Thanks for appreciating the metaphor. I hope it does have legs.

 

Jerrid Grimm (46:57.556)

Yeah, I love it. Okay, well, thanks for being on my show, Keith. Really appreciate it and looking forward to seeing as you develop more and more relationships with these retailers and these publishers and the whole space of commerce media in the future.

 

Keith Bryan (47:11.591)

Well, thanks, Jared. It was a pleasure and I hope to join you again sometime.