Ferrero’s Danielle Sporkin breaks down the reality behind retail media’s full-funnel promise

Now, if advertisers see it as such, that’s still up for debate.

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“The challenge we continue to have is the overlap and national scale,” said Danielle Sporkin, svp of media and marketing services for North America at Ferrero. “As we start to add more and more retailers to a retail media mix, are we just reaching the same people over and over?” She was speaking at the Digiday, Modern Retail and Glossy’s Retail Media Advertising Strategies event, which was held in New York City on Sept. 10. 

That’s not to say advertisers aren’t willing to give RMNs a chance, but it’s noodles thrown at the wall to see what sticks approach. That said, Sporkin broke down how Ferrero is evolving its retail media strategy beyond search and display, measurement framework, testing and learning and internal cross functional ownership for strategy and budget.

Also on this episode, why Paramount Skydance is eyeing a bid for Warner Bros Discovery, what the Amazon and Netflix DSP deal could mean for The Trade Desk and inside the FTC’s latest big tech probe.

Retail media’s changing definition 

I don’t think there is one standard, but for us, the way we started to think about it is retail media being any of the offerings that are coming from our retail partners. So that could be data, that could be on-site, that could be off-site, everything that encompasses some sort of retailer partnership. And then we think about e-commerce as anything that’s helping to drive a digital sale. If you think about a Venn diagram, there’s an overlap in the middle between the two, but there are also other offerings, social commerce offerings, websites, et cetera, that you can leverage to drive e-commerce that isn’t necessarily retail media.

Testing “precision at scale”

Some of the things we’ve been testing as we are bringing retailer data further up the funnel is what we’re calling precision at scale. We’re layering strategic national audience buys, these more precise, addressable audiences. We leverage retailer data and syndicated data with bespoke messaging that speaks to those individual audiences as another layer of our national plan. What we found in this testing is when you combine those larger mass strategic audiences with these more precise audiences that have messages that speak more uniquely to those audiences but still fitting within the overarching creative framework, we see incremental gains. We see better gains in our ad awareness. We see better gains in our brand or product awareness.

Team structure and spend around retail media

Within our organization, we have different teams that are focused on different objectives. Our brand marketers are about building that brand awareness, that penetration and ultimately that brand love. Our trade marketing team is about creating those deep connections along with our sales team, with our retailer partners. The trade team is the front lines with the retailers, making sure that we have those really strong relationships and sales. Our shopper team is really focused on intercepting consumers at the point of purchase. And then our e-commerce team is all about driving our digital share and our digital penetration.