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A brand doing under $50 million a year is putting roughly half of its combined retail media, trade, and shopper marketing budget into retail media. At larger companies that share drops toward 30, 20, then 15 percent. Mike Chiasson works on Keen's models, which cover $45 billion in marketing investment, and his read on where that money comes from is the part worth sitting with. It is mostly net new, sourced out of trade rather than pulled from Meta and Google, which is why so much of it sits with sales teams and never gets measured the way media does.
If you run growth at a brand moving into retail: this is the episode about what the retail media line in your budget is actually buying, and which part of it is buying customers you already had.
If you own the media budget: Chiasson makes the case that the untapped return in retail media is upper funnel, inside retailers where almost everyone is still only buying search.
What he gets into:
- Where the money comes from, and why trade budgets rather than media budgets explain retail media's growth
- The benchmark: about half the retail media, trade, and shopper marketing bucket at brands under $50M, versus 15 to 30 percent at large ones
- Why small brands with a narrow distribution footprint default to bottom-funnel search, and what that costs them
- The Amazon question: whether retail media spend compounds on a retailer's algorithm the way it does on a listing, and why brick and mortar has no real equivalent
- Retail media ads that carry no visible association with the retailer at all, and why targeting is the actual product
- Walmart, Vizio, and streaming video as the moment upper-funnel retail media became buyable
- Retail media social, which he calls very small and rapidly growing, with returns he thinks reflect how early the curve is
- The two flaws in ROAS, and why the return on your next dollar is the only version of the number that helps you plan
- Bayesian priors, and how Keen gives a brand a response curve for a retailer it has never advertised with
- Patience as a budgeting problem rather than a virtue, and why cash-strapped brands structurally cannot buy upper funnel
Who this is for: operators whose product is landing on shelves in more places every quarter, and whose retail media invoices are growing faster than their ability to explain them.
What to steal: find out which budget your retail media is actually coming from. If it is trade, the people approving it are measuring a retailer relationship and the people spending it are measuring sales. Those are different jobs and almost nobody has reconciled them.
Harness the Halo is a six-part series from DTC and Keen about the spend that doesn't pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it. Episode 1 was the market read. Episode 2 was the first brand. This one maps the fastest-growing line in the budget.
Timestamps:
00:00 Why retail media is becoming a major growth channel
04:00 Where retail media investment is growing
08:00 Why retail media ROI is outperforming other tactics
13:00 The upper-funnel opportunity in retail media
17:00 Why marginal ROI matters more than ROAS
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