In 2022, advertising contributed $37.7 billion to Amazon’s total revenue. The wealth of shopper data it has access to gives the brand a significant advantage, but so does the technology stack it owns. For starters, Amazon lays claim to a fully-fledged DSP and, in 2019, acquired Sizmek’s ad-serving and DCO technologies for deeper capabilities.

As it stands, few (if any) other retailers have the muscle to invest in a media proposition like Amazon does. Despite this, the opportunity to add new streams of high-margin, incremental revenue means that creating a media network has become a strategic priority for any retailer with a large enough audience.

But retailers are historically media buyers -- not sellers. In order to maximise the commercial value of a retail media network, retailers must learn from media owners how to build a robust adtech stack that can properly monetise their audience data across owned and third-party media.

The Challenges of an Underdeveloped Adtech Stack

While many retailers have begun to assemble various technologies to create an offering, they’ve quickly encountered a series of challenges.

1. A lack of cohesion: Varying data sources can have incompatibility issues when processed into a single source of truth. Manually compiling, standardising and querying datasets is complex work that requires a trained data specialist.
2. Inaccessibility: Even if you have a dedicated data team, there’s no guarantee they’ll be available at a moment’s notice. In today’s fast-paced market, marketing and sales teams need readily-accessible and real-time insight into customer data.
3. Reduced performance: To advertise effectively, retail brands need to understand their customer’s entire purchasing journey -- joining the dots across first, second, and third-party data sources, and across online and offline touchpoints. When your organisation can’t collect and present these insights accurately,  you will struggle to sell the full value of your audience segments.
4. Incomplete reporting: Retail media networks need to be able to close the loop on performance - feeding actions back into their customer view and providing clear reporting on performance. Transparency over performance is one of the top priorities of brands advertising in retail media, and if this is not available in-flight, a retailer’s ability to rebook campaigns will be hindered.

How to Build a Robust Retail Media Technology Stack

To become competitive, retail brands need an intelligent technology stack that can process large volumes of customer data and deliver media campaigns for advertisers from the information gathered.

Your stack should consist of three clearly defined layers (as shown in the diagram), awarding function and ease-of-use without compromising capability. While we summarise the key parts of these systems below, you can find more detail in our recent whitepaper, “The Retailer’s Guide to Unlocking Data-Driven Advertising Success”.

Back-End: Data Management Layer

Sufficient access to behavioural and transactional data is a fundamental starting point for any retail brand that wants to execute onsite and offsite marketing campaigns. To efficiently collect and process data, your technology stack needs an Online Analytical Processing Engine working behind-the-scenes. This would allow for the seamless aggregation of your data to create a single customer view, crucial to powering the rest of your technology stack.

Back-End: Processing Layer

To successfully publish adverts at the right time, to the right audience and, in the right format, every technology stack needs an element of campaign management. This includes the ability to query your data management layer to create audience insights and segments and then activate those into digital media for advertisers. An integrator technology helps to push these segments through product recommendation tools (like Criteo) and DSPs (such as Google) to then return campaign data to your data management layer for accurate measurement.

Front-End: UX Layer

Your technology stack needs to be catered to its end user. Often, this is a retailer’s internal data team. Ideally, though, it will be your marketing team or even your end clients who operate your retail media technology. The UX layer sits on top of the other layers to transform the entire system into something usable - meaning individuals don’t have to work through a complicated bundle of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and database languages.  

The Secret to Unlocking Retail Media Revenue Streams

Once you can access insightful customer data with ease, your organisation will have opened the door to a whole world of potential.

At mediarithmics, we’ve spent years carefully designing a technology that’s capable of translating vast volumes of customer data into actionable segments.

In partnership with Bleu Capital and Spring Invest, we’ve put together a paper that will teach you more about data technology, aid your decision-making, and help you successfully navigate the competitive retail media landscape.

Download "The Ultimate Retailer's Guide to Unlocking Data-Driven Advertising Success” to find out more, today.