A fun night at Gotham Comedy Club where various retail media luminaries mock debated whether amongst other things, agentic ai spells the death knell for the retail media gravy train.
It was a fun event and many thanks to Zitcha and QSIC for co-hosting and congrats to the grim reaper Kiri Masters for being the audience favourite.
Whether the audience voted on the basis of the messenger or the message was unclear.
If the latter then it would seem that many people in the retail media world see a bleak future ahead.
Another weird thing. A leading USA luminary seemed to think that retail media was invented by Amazon and then taken to market by a band of pioneers from Triad (now Criteo) and so by her definition retail media is really just sponsored ads and has only been a thing for less than 10 years.
Neither Colin Lewis or Sarah Marzano were able to persuade the audience otherwise.
And yet, anyone applying a bit of thinking would surely conclude :
- Retailers have been media vehicles ever since their inception and brands have always, and are likely to continue for always, to advertise in and around them.
- Media propositions have evolved and will continue to do so. A sponsored product ad is an innovation, as were banner ads, Instore radio, shopping trolley ads, loyalty card communications and cardboard signage.
- AI will act as an aid to customers doing their shopping and will hopefully make the process faster, cheaper, better in some way.
- There will be ai acting for the customers, ai acting for the brands and ai acting for the retailers.
- The retail and brand ai will seek to influence the customer ai. Each will seek to exploit their knowledge asymmetries. Each will try to figure out why the customer (and their ai) acted like they did (and will use more ai to help figure this out).
- Some brands and some retailers will do this better than others and will gain market share.
- Either way, I'm betting big that retail media will be here for another hundred years, and we are going to be doing what we can to help our clients to use retail media to drive growth
#retailmedia
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