Tools of the Trade: Click to Cart—What Retail Media Can Actually Prove, with RMIQ

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Want to take the conversation further? Join us for our webinar, Click to Cart: How Retail Media Closes the Loop Between Ad & Sale, on Tuesday, August 25, at 10:00 a.m. PT.

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EPISODE OVERVIEW

As the marketing industry and the world at large continues to experience its own digital transformation, marketers have seen an explosion of channels, platforms, and of course data. To better understand the reality of today's marketing landscape and the tools at our disposal, we present our Tools of the Trade episode series. In this episode, we sit down with Mat Drela, retail media expert, author and path to purchase, 40 under 40 honoree at RMIQ, Red Door's exclusive retail media specialist partner. We cut through the hype to explain what retail media really is, why its closed loop measurement changes the game for challenger brands, and how the purchase data it generates can sharpen a brand's entire marketing plan.

In this episode, we cover:

• What is retail media beyond Amazon?
• How does retail media close the loop?
• Why does retail media benefit challenger brands?
• Is ROAS enough to measure retail media success?
• How can retail media data shape brand strategy?
• Where do purchase signals add value?
• How should brands get started with retail media?
• Final thoughts and key takeaways

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

WHAT IS RETAIL MEDIA BEYOND AMAZON?‍

Reid Carr: Well, it's great we're going to be able to explain all this to people. I think one of the common misconceptions is brands that think retail media equals Amazon, what is the fuller picture and which parts of the landscape do people most often miss in your opinion?‍

Mat Drela: Yeah, Amazon is of course a very, very important part of the retail media picture. They're the original company which created the concept, the industry of retail media, but it has moved very far beyond. It has expanded horizontally across multiple retail outlets for e-commerce platforms that all now offer advertising solutions. In the US alone, there are over 70 standalone retail media networks. Any major retailer, any major e-commerce site is going to have their own advertising solution. From big box retailers, generous retailers such as Walmart, Target, to specialists like Chewy or Dick's Sporting Goods. Anyone really that's selling a good portion of their goods online either already has an advertising network or is looking to build one.

‍Reid Carr: Yeah. Okay. So let's clear up some stuff for people then. I mean, you wrote the book on this, so what's the single most common misconception that brands hold about retail media?‍

Mat Drela: Beyond operational misconceptions and questions of which there's still a lot, this being such a new space and it being so fragmented, probably the most common misconception is that retail media is very much just bottom of the funnel type tactic, last push, last mile. While in reality, it's arguably much more mid-funnel and sometimes even top of the funnel solution. The funnel, the traditional marketing funnel, has not collapsed. It's still very much there, but it has in a lot of ways concentrated within a single platform. So it's very often that the shopping journey begins and within the same platform. Very often the journey is very quick, but very often also it goes through traditional phases of exploration, comparison, consideration, and then ultimately purchase all again within the confines of a single marketing platform.

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HOW DOES RETAIL MEDIA CLOSE THE LOOP?‍

Reid Carr: Yeah. So I think a lot of people within this idea of closing the loop or wanting to close the loop, retail media is kind of described as the channel where the ad and the sale meet, but well, what does that actually look like? What does it let a marketer see that other channels can't?‍

Mat Drela: Yeah, I think this is the most interesting part of retail media is that you advertise where the sale happens. And there is probably the only or one of the very few channels where you can directly or most accurately attribute the advertisement to a purchase. You have the ability or as a marketer, you have the ability to trigger ads based on certain user behavior. You see how the users interact with your particular ad. So you see impressions, you see clicks, and then you see the next steps to add to carts and then ultimately purchases. So you see the entire marketing journey from showing an ad to generating a sale and it's all done in an environment where you can see the data, where you can see what works better, which triggers convert into sales more efficiently, which are less efficient, et cetera.‍

Reid Carr: Now in that loop, and obviously seen this so many times, has there been anything in particular that's surprised you? I mean, you've been doing this a while, you've written the book. I mean, with all of this, there's got to be a few cases in which your ability to see all this data and see these things happen, what's changed for you in that timeframe?‍

Mat Drela: I think one of the most surprising things and one of the things that brands still need to be educated on is that very often the decisions are made simply based on impulse. There's a lot of impulse buying happening online and I guess different retail environments, different retail platforms have different propensities to promote these impulse purchases. So very often it is enough to position the product to a user at the right time when they are searching for a specific thing. And that in itself is enough to trigger a purchase, to trigger a trial, to get the user to simply buy the product. I think it's the online equivalent of an active in-store demo when somebody comes into a store and somebody's actively presenting them a product, "Hey, would you like to buy this?"‍

Reid Carr: Yeah, it's aligned with their demographic. It's aligned with other attributes, things that make a lot of sense, which seems to be probably a lot better than just a random person walking along in a grocery store. I mean, know a lot more about them getting there.‍

Mat Drela: Absolutely.

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WHY DOES RETAIL MEDIA BENEFIT CHALLENGER BRANDS?

Reid Carr: Which is interesting. I mean, I think this evolves from, you can talk about from big brand to smaller or challenger brands. I mean, RMIQ has called retail media the low-hanging fruit for a product launch. So for a challenger brand, why does provable measurement matter more than maybe the big ad budget that others might have?‍

Mat Drela: With retail media, and especially within certain platforms, certain environments, you're able to, as mentioned, trigger this purchasing behavior in quite a predictable and measurable way. So going from, let's say, huge marketing budgets, which initially are there to create recognition to create brand awareness to get the name out there and then hope that this awareness eventually leads to consideration and a purchase. With retail media, you have a very proven and a very methodical way of generating these purchases, of generating new to brand purchases, of finding new users, and you're able to do this in a scalable way. You're able to do this starting with a relatively small budget and you're able to scale it as the brand grows.

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IS ROAS ENOUGH TO MEASURE RETAIL MEDIA SUCCESS?‍

Reid Carr: Yeah. So a lot of different brands, so in the spirit of measuring and figuring out what's working, they're looking at a number of metrics, one of which is ROAS, return on ad spend. But why is that in this case not always the right metric? I mean, what should brands look at instead to judge whether or not the retail media is working?

‍Mat Drela: Yeah, I mean, ROAS is of course ROAS is quite a simplistic metric which tells you if a particular campaign is performing well or not. It does not necessarily paint the whole picture. It does not tell you if the advertising campaign is converting into high lifetime value users, if it's converting into repeat purchases, if it's converting into new user trials, etc.. It's a good proxy, but in itself it's not enough. And really the discussions within retail media, especially around measurement are around proving incrementality or proving new-to-brand users. New to brand is quite a standard metric within retail media platforms for a lot of brands, especially the growing ones, especially the ones which are looking to expand beyond their current customer base. New-to-brand is probably the more appropriate metric. ROAS can also be at times somewhat deceiving. It can also just simply measure that purchases that would've happened anyway, especially when there is an element of brand bidding, brands bidding on their own keywords.

We actively discourage that practice because again, it tends to lead to overinflated numbers and not really to what matters in terms of brand growth. Yeah, that's why it's very important to look beyond ROAS itself and into other measures, which fortunately more and more of retail media platforms are providing.

Reid Carr: So I mean, that's what's so fascinating to me in retail media. I think there's a lot of other metrics that I think people don't think about because I think they've gotten so used to other channels, other traditional channels. So retail media therefore can be quite the insight engine, something that can give you a lot of insight into an input into the ads that they're going to put out and the messaging strategy and some of that stuff.

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HOW CAN RETAIL MEDIA DATA SHAPE BRAND STRATEGY?

So beyond driving sales, I mean, retail media generates rich purchase data. I mean, how can the highest performing search terms inform a brand's messaging and audience strategy?

Mat Drela: I mean, I think there's two sides to this. So retail media and especially the search data tells you sometimes it tells the brands more than they could actually infer themselves: what searches or what user intent is actually driving the sale of their product. But also conversely, what searches or what user intent is not driving sales or is leading to no conversions or inefficient conversions. So both of these signals are very important or can be used in a lot of ways to fine-tune brand messaging. A lot of the clients that we work with are in the natural organic space. And for them, it's very often insightful and surprising how much of a difference these sort of differentiators or these descriptive terms make in terms of conversion. So the search data, what users are searching for, what actually leads to a purchase, what leads to an efficient purchase, what leads to an inefficient purchase from a return point of view and what leads to no purchase at all is a very rich data set which brands they can then use in a very broader marketing plan.

Reid Carr: Yeah. And that goes back to what you were saying too, is that new-to-brand. I mean what's getting them to this tipping point to try something new as opposed to just staying within the same category or something that they're more familiar with? Getting people to convert over to something entirely new for most advertisers is that's the bigger ask. What they ask us as an agency is we're trying to pull people from one place to another, particularly in retail. It's not like they weren't considering this category at all, but now you've got new information to help inform how we're going to message and how we're going to advertise in channel, in retail media, or in other places too, to influence and prime that pump for when they are ready to buy.

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WHERE DO PURCHASE SIGNALS ADD VALUE?

So that gets to then the bigger picture of the value across the rest of the marketing plan. Where does that purchase signal data create some of the most value across the rest of this marketing plan? I mean, like I was just saying, it influences us quite a bit, but what are some other things that you see?‍

Mat Drela: Of course the mostly media crossover in terms of other marketing channels is within search. So retail media is essentially driven by search except on site. The same sort of search terms, search triggers can be used offsite on search engines. But when we also see thanks to the search data, what descriptive terms or what exact terms are driving the most efficient sales? Those can then be used to narrow down the audiences that we're going at. When we see, let's say, a huge difference in conversion rates or in return on ad spend on a particular subset of keywords, we can then link those to an audience that is looking for that kind of subset of products and focus our advertising on that particular group.‍

Reid Carr: Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the things that we try to drive home and I really want to reinforce for our listeners is this idea of seeing a channel like this as something far more than just media dollars. It informs strategy. If you're really using this data right and using this channel right, it's so much more than ROAS or new-to-brand. It is influencing the messaging and influencing who you're reaching far beyond just this one channel. And I think that's why integration in our opinion at Red Door is so important because I can apply that data to other things as well, not just sitting here in this kind of isolated media channel or something like that. So making more out of it, it's so valuable to know what actually drives purchase and what actually gets people to try the brand for the first time. So after that, the product's got to fulfill. It's got to be a good product.

‍Mat Drela: It's got to do its job

‍Reid Carr: Exactly.

‍Reid Carr: So this has been awesome. I really appreciate you joining us here, Matt.

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HOW SHOULD BRANDS GET STARTED WITH RETAIL MEDIA?

For a brand curious but new to retail media, what's a sensible first step with us and with RMIQ and what should they expect to learn from it?

‍Mat Drela: Well, I guess the one caveat around retail media is that it is retail specific. So you're essentially advertising to a particular audience on a particular retail site or retail platform. So any initial retail media strategy begins with identifying which platform is the most important. And it can be a generalist channel, something like an Amazon Walmart or a Target. It can be a specialist channel. It can be an intermediary, someone like Instacart or DoorDash for those immediate purchases. But to answer this question, I mean you need to think a little bit more or the US brand needs to think a little bit more deeply, what is my strategy? What do I want to achieve from this? Am I looking for an immediate return? Do I need to immediately prove a return on investment on my initial ad dollars? Am I looking at this more broadly? Am I looking more to collect data and inform my broader media strategy that I'm able to accept short-term investment costs for then a better long-term outcome? Or do I need to prove out the channel first to then be able to expect? Because that really informs your strategy, that informs your starting point, that informs your budgets essentially, and that informs the outcomes that you should be able to expect.‍

Reid Carr: Yeah. So one of the lessons I've learned along the way is for anyone to want to try something new, they have to take that from one existing budget bucket from one place to another. So in order to try retail media, where's the most common place people take budget from to give retail media a shot, you think?‍

Mat Drela: Well, I would like to think that a lot of the budgets are incremental, net new.

Reid Carr: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, a lot of times they just say, "Hey man, I want to try it. I didn't plan for this, but now I'm compelled to give it a shot. I got to take it from somewhere." Is it coming out of the digital media budget? Is it coming from something else? And sometimes obviously just general retail support.

Mat Drela: I mean, most common, obviously it comes out of traditional trade budgets, but that more pertains to bigger brands that have the trade relationships. For smaller brands, it comes out of, I mean, typically retail media sits within performance budgets. So whichever channels a given brand allocates to performance to generating new customers, this is where retail media will sit. And this is the most common use case that we find with the clients where the expectation is that this is a revenue generating or a profitable endeavor almost from the start.‍

Reid Carr: Yeah. And like we said earlier, it throws off some data that's really going to inform the rest of it and hopefully help turn the dial on a lot of other places as well.

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FINAL THOUGHTS & KEY TAKEAWAYS

Reid Carr: So hopefully our listeners are compelled, but if they want to learn more about this, join our webinar on Tuesday, August 25th, 2026, for those of you who might listen to it after the fact.

So you can find a signup link for this session on reddoor.biz/learn for those who end up catching this after the fact. And you can also find us at reddoor.biz/learn and listen to the show notes or watch on demand after that.

Reid Carr: So Matt, it was fantastic speaking with you. We'll look forward to talking with you more on August 25th. So thanks for joining us and thanks for informing our listeners.

Mat Drela: Thank you so much. Looking forward to it.

Reid Carr: Awesome. Take care everyone.

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