What Retail Media Network Management Involves and Why Regional Grocers Don’t Have to Do It Themselves

Every regional grocer has heard the retail media advertising pitch.

Your first-party shopper data is an untapped asset, and it’s time to stop handing your placements to the marketplaces.

What the pitch leaves out is that a retail media network isn’t a feature you switch on. It’s an operating function, and it runs on people. Selling ad space to Tide, Coke, and other CPG companies is a business of its own: someone has to walk into the meeting with the brand, build the audience that brand is paying to reach, run the campaign, and then prove to a brand manager that it worked.

Now look at a regional grocer’s organizational chart.

Nobody on it does those jobs, or has the capacity to. Doing it in-house means hiring a seller, an ad manager to own campaign management, and an analyst, then paying all three long before you sell your first ad.

The barrier was never technology or traffic. The storefront is yours, the app is yours, and so is the shopper behavior running underneath both.

The real barrier is staffing, and staffing is the one piece of a Retail Media Network you can hand off to someone else.

Why Your Retail Media Advertising Plan Stalls After Approval

Approving a retail media network is rarely met with any objection.

And why would it be?

The traffic, shopper data, and revenue opportunity are already there and sells itself in a single slide. Naturally, the RMN gets a line in next year’s budget, and the team moves on to implementation.

The hard part is managing all of the responsibilities that simple approval commits the business to.

Pricing placements, selling placements, and speaking with media buyers are all examples of new tasks and responsibilities that get piled onto the company’s plate.

And that’s just the beginning.

Once a brand commits, the work turns operational: building the audience, collecting creative, scheduling it, watching delivery, and of course, reporting and presenting the results to the CPG brands spending with you.

Every one of those steps has to land on a person, and every one of those people is often already spoken for. The ecommerce manager already runs the storefront, marketing has their hands full with the flyer and loyalty calendar, and merchandising is tied up with vendor negotiations. Every one of those roles was built to deliver operational efficiency somewhere else in the business.

Meaning nobody has the time or capacity to own the RMN.

Regrettably, when a grocer’s Retail Media Network runs on borrowed hours, the revenue that sold itself in a single slide never shows up as a win in your Profit and Loss Statement.

Why Owning A Network And Running One Are Two Different Jobs

A Retail Media Network has two halves, and regional grocers only ever get pitched on one of them.

The first half is ad space, which is the half regional grocers already own, and it spans multiple ad formats.

• Search results and category pages, where sponsored product ads sit
• Banners on your homepage and the carousels in your app
• Emails and push notifications your shoppers already opted into
• The purchase data behind all of these elements, which can tell a brand who buys their product, who buys their competitor’s, and who stopped buying either one

All of it sits on the retailer’s website and app, which is inventory you’re already paying to run.

The second half is retail media network management, which is the work of selling that space to advertisers.

Which includes:

• Pricing the placements
• Getting in front of the brand teams and asking for the shopper marketing budget
• Building the audience the brand paid to reach
• Loading their ads and watching them run
• Developing campaign performance reporting a brand manager can take to their own boss
• Sending the invoice, then going back to map out your next quarter

Ad space doesn’t earn anything on its own. An empty banner slot pays the same as no banner slot at all. Somebody has to go out, find the brand, sell them the placement, and prove it worked, or the space just sits there. A grocer can own every placement in the network and every data point behind it and still see nothing land in their Profit and Loss Statement, because nobody ever made the sale.

Which means the question for grocers was never really whether to launch a Retail Media Network or not. It was about who does the selling.

With a managed network operating model, that question can finally be answered. Because with a managed operating model, grocers can keep their ad space, shopper data, and their revenue. While a Retail Media Network partner brings the sellers, the ad operations team, and the reporting, all under your brand.

What Mercatus’s Fully Managed Retail Media Network Can Do for Regional Grocers

That second half, the selling, is the part the Mercatus Retail Media Network covers, as we supply the digital advertising team you would otherwise have to hire.

With Mercatus, your network sits inside our DXPro platform, so there’s no new system to buy and nothing to rebuild. Your ad space stays where it is, but now someone else is responsible for turning it into revenue.

Alongside our team of Retail Media Network specialists, we handle the CPG brand partner conversations, price the placements, and close the commitment, which means the ad dollars are committed as a flat amount for a set period rather than billed every time the ad is shown. Once a brand signs, we build the audience, load the creative, and watch delivery.

The audiences come out of behavior your platform already tracks, which is how a brand can reach the shoppers already buying its products, or the ones buying a competitor’s. That’s the right shopper, reached at the point in the customer journey where the decision is already being made.

Our team puts together the performance metrics a brand manager needs to justify the spend internally, and we take care of invoicing and collections.

All you have to do is collect your share of the revenue.

Turn Your Existing Shopper Traffic Into Digital Advertising Revenue

As a regional grocer, you already have everything a Retail Media Network needs. The storefront, the app, the emails, the shoppers moving through all of it, and the purchase history underneath. Your first-party shopper data is an asset that pays twice: once when it sells groceries, and again when it sells ad space. The only piece missing was somebody to sell it.

Once that’s covered, the network works in every direction. You get revenue from inventory that used to sit empty, with no new hires. Plus, CPG brands get new audiences they can target and reporting they can defend, so there’s no wasted ad spend to explain at the end of the quarter. And of course, measurable results are what bring those brands back next quarter instead of shifting their ad spend to a marketplace.

None of that comes down to technology; it comes down to who does the work.

Speak to a member of our team today to learn more about the Mercatus Retail Media Network.