The 3 Main Ways Companies Can Launch a Retail Media Network (RMN) [VIDEO]

Retail media has seen remarkable growth in recent years. According to eMarketer, global spending on retail media advertising is expected to rise by nearly $100 billion between 2020 and 2025.

This year alone, a projected 21.8% increase will likely surpass growth rates in almost every other advertising category.

The rise of retail media can largely be attributed to the expansion of retail media networks (RMNs), with most retail and commerce companies having introduced their own RMN offerings in recent years.

When it comes to launching a retail media network, retailers and commerce companies have three main approaches:

• Rent an existing tool.
• Build a custom solution.
• Buy an established company for the technology.

In this video interview, we explore the advantages and disadvantages of each option.

Questions Covered in the Video Interview

• What is retail media, and how has it evolved over the past decade?
• Would retail media be as big as it is now without changes in privacy regulations and the end of third-party cookies?
• What are the main ways retailers and e-commerce companies can build a retail media network?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of building a retail media network in-house or with external partners?
• What are the benefits of using an existing AdTech platform to power a retail media network?
• What are the drawbacks of relying on existing platforms for retail media networks?
• What considerations should companies have when deciding to acquire a business for its technology or user base?
• How have acquisitions in the AdTech space, such as those by telcos and other large companies, played out?

Below is the condensed and edited transcript from the video interview.

What is retail media, and how has it evolved over the past decade?

Michael Sweeney: Hello everyone. My name is Michael Sweeney and I’m the marketing director of AdTech and MarTech at Qinshift.

In today’s video, I’m joined by Niraj Nagpal who is an independent AdTech and MarTech consultant based in APAC, as well as my colleagues Radek Kostecki, business development director of AdTech and MarTech, and Greg Łukaszewicz, head of discipline business analysis and consultancy.

And in today’s video, we’re going to be talking about retail media, but specifically will be discussing the 3 main ways retailers and other companies operating in e-commerce industry can build a retail media network, and the advantages and disadvantages of each option.

So before we get started, Niraj, I’ll start with you. Just spend a few minutes telling us about retail media and how it’s evolved. Because, I guess, for a lot of people either working in retail or programming advertising, it may seem that retail media is a fairly new topic that’s only been around for a few years, but in fact it goes back much further than that.

So yeah, just spend a few minutes telling us a bit about retail media and how it’s evolved over the past decade or so.

Niraj Nagpal: Thank you Michael and thank you to the team at Qinshift for the opportunity to speak about something that is very important and dear to my heart, and in some ways will become the future of the internet.

Essentially the idea of retail media networks is not new, it’s been occurring now for more almost was two decades and the leaders in the space have been traditionally retailers and online marketplaces such as eBay or amazon.com, essentially marketplaces where people are buying goods of some sort.

What has changed is that their original business model is making a profit of selling goods, but what is in some ways mature it’s not just active you sold a good ones is that they’re now able, or spent a decade or so building out the technologies, to start tracking and keeping a long-term history of what you’re buying, what you’re browsing, what your life stages are, and how you navigate that.

And then making that data available for other advertisers, other retailers to then leverage for their own advertising campaigns.

And oftentimes those advertising campaigns are up here on the merchant site, so for example when you’re browsing amazon.com, you’ll see sponsored listings or keyword listing ads that kind of match the domain of what you’re looking for.

And then what you’re starting to see as the retailer matures is that oftentimes as you browse internet, you’ll start seeing the different products you’re looking at follow you around.

Or you were buying diapers one day and suddenly as you browse the internet you start getting ads from toy stores because the toy stores are like oh, this is someone who might be a new parent.

And oftentimes the retail media network trend is definitely increased as there’s been changes and privacy and data proliferation. And so what we’re seeing is that advertisers are more reliant on businesses that have some sort of source of truth of data and that could be what you’re buying and what you’re browsing.

They can also be your travel bookings, they could go even as more recently as where you’re travelling to in terms of in your taxis, your Ubers.

All of that, everything you’re doing, essentially, is a data signal that can some ways be monetised and what merchants and retailers are starting to learn about is there’s actually an opportunity to run a very profitable business.

if you’re able to get the consent and the scale necessary to reach out to new advertisers, and merchants, and agencies and say hey, I know something about someone, what is that value to you.

And so, what started about 12 years ago with amazon.com launching their ad business, is now probably a 50 to 70 billion dollar global business with majority of that money still going to Amazon and Amazon advertising, but we are starting to see a new crop of different retailers from hotels, to Ubers and Grabs of the world, to pet stores, to gas stations.

There’s definitely a big domain momentum occurring in the space.

Would retail media be as big as it is now without changes in privacy regulations and the end of third-party cookies?

Michael Sweeney: Definitely, perfect, so yeah, thanks for that, Niraj. Just have a bit of a side question here for you, something I’ve been kind of thinking about with retail media.

Given its growth and how popular it is at the moment, and you kind of touched on this with your response there about things like the end of third party cookies and the whole focus on privacy and first party data, I guess this is maybe a bit of a hypothetical or even a philosophical question, but do you think that if it weren’t for things like the whole change in privacy, the end of third party cookies, etc., do you think that retail media would be as big as it is now?

Or do you think that it kind of needed some kind of big catalyst to kind of really drive the growth?

Because as you said, retail media has been around since 2012 when Amazon launched their retail media network, other companies like Walmart, I think even Target in the US also launched theirs quite a few years ago as well.

So do you think that the boom that we’re experiencing now with retail media is directly influenced by the changes with third party cookies and the broader privacy aspects, or do you think it’s really retail media’s time?

Do you think that a lot of brands are seeing the opportunities now?

Niraj Nagpal: Like any good politician, I’ll say it’s a mix of both. The honest truth is up until in some ways Amazon started declaring how much money they were making in Amazon advertising, people didn’t realize it’s a 40 billion dollar business, sleeping giant in disguise, after 10 years to get to that maturity.

And then when people see billions at stake, they are going to emulate and not all retail media networks have been successful by any means, but there’s definitely an increased appetite for data that has some truth behind it. The retailers, or we’ll use retail as a broad term, know if you’re male or female, oftentimes that’s just guessing with cookies.

They know what you bought, where you live, they know your life, they can probably guess your life stages, so there’s definitely a bigger appetite as programmatic matures to get better data versus just guessing, so a mix of both for sure.

What are the main ways retailers and e-commerce companies can build a retail media network?

Michael Sweeney: Definitely, definitely. Yeah, I guess for a lot of brands, the best type of data is the one that is about purchase intent, for example, that’s super valuable for a lot of brands so that definitely makes sense as well. So yeah, excellent.

Alright, thanks Niraj, I’ll also continue with you there. So just tell us about the main ways that retail and other commerce companies can build a retail media network, right. Because I guess when we’re talking about retail media networks, we’re essentially talking about the technology that powers their advertising business, which you touched on before as well.

Niraj Nagpal: Right.

Michael Sweeney: So if a retailer or other company operating in the commerce world wants to build an advertising business and they’re looking at the tech side of it, what are the three main options they have to explore?

Niraj Nagpal: Right, and it’s enter the advertising business with our acronyms and changing technologies is a bit fraught. And if you’re a business that’s been mainly thinking about supply chain and shelf space, or ticket bookings and seats, right, this is a new world to break into.

So oftentimes, partnering is one way to enter, where you partner with a development company to help you develop what you think you need to have a successful retail media network, or you can say hey, we understand technology, how hard could it really be to have an ad server, a user interface, role-based access optimisation engines, and try to go and build it yourself.

And there’s pros and cons for this option, so we’ll get into it later on, or you can work with a new emerging tech categorisation, which is like retail media networks in a box where you can essentially white label different components and there’s probably a dozen or so different companies around the world.

Like the Kevels, and CitrusAd, and Criteos, and Online sales, and dozens of others that help you get from point A to point B with some off the shelf solutions.

Or you can start to make some acquisitions, like we saw with telcos a few years ago where they would buy DSPs or SSPs and try to get market entry that way, or even a couple weeks ago we saw Walmart start buying Vizio and that they didn’t buy Vizio, a TV manufacturer, because they wanted TVs, they wanted new places to serve ads.

They were running out of space on Walmart.com, so a way to bring their audiences to a different environment where it’s a little bit more valuable to pay $100 CPMs versus two dollar CPMs. So those are the three ways of essentially building, buying, partnering to launch a business.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of building a retail media network in-house or with external partners?

Michael Sweeney: Excellent. So yeah, let’s continue down that road there and let’s look at some of the main advantages and disadvantages of each of those 3 options you just mentioned.

So let’s start with the main advantages of building a retail media network, so as you mentioned before about the option of actually building the tech yourself, as you said, either using an in-house engineering team or partnering with an external partner if you don’t have the internal resources to do it.

What are some of the main advantages of building the technology yourself if you’re a retailer or company operating in e-commerce industry?

Niraj Nagpal: Oftentimes, it’s that perceived idea that we have the domain expertise and we know how to work out with our internal systems, we can make it privacy-centric from design. We can just be an IP for us that we maybe say that we build this from scratch, and then you view it as an initial capital expenditure vs operational expenditure over time.

So sometimes it is advantageous, of course there’s challenges of scaling it and I’m sure your next question will be like why wouldn’t you do this, and oftentimes it’s very hard to find the right engineering or talent to sell retail media networks. It’s very hard to have the domain knowledge, to keep up with the latest trends and requirements.

And oftentimes, finding a more hybrid approach might be better from the start, and then you maybe work with an external provider to have a full solution when you’re ready.

Michael Sweeney: Excellent, perfect. Now let’s discuss some of the main, I guess, disadvantages of building a retail media network either with your internal teams or with a partner as well. So Radek, I’ll start with you, what are some of, I guess, the main disadvantages of going down this path and building the tech yourself, essentially?

Radosław Kostecki: Sure, Mike. Even though the actual IP is always tempting for different companies, because actually whenever they have a business idea, they could actually develop the system. But also as Niraj’s mentioned if we have the white label providers like Kevel, CitrusAd, or others, here the time to market might be critical.

If the company is not so aware also business-wise if the actual idea would work for them in the short term, they might decide on the actual white label part, or, I don’t know, use some part of the components to get to the market as soon as possible just to test it out.

Obviously knowing the business more and having also a chance to test it out properly in the white label solution, they could consider building their own, but it requires some level of awareness, so that’s why also some of the bigger ones decide to acquire.

So I think Walmart acquiring Vizio is a very good example that they just take part of the business just by acquisition, but these are for the big players, the smaller ones they need to first be aware of that business strategy, if it’s the right one for them, right.

I think there’s also a point about technical that, I think maybe Greg think about it, as you’re more tech than I am.

Grzegorz Łukaszewicz: I mean generally the technology that you own, you need to maintain and I think that’s a big deal for some of the companies at least. And the technical debt will arise, and especially when we are talking about the fast growing part of the industry that come up with new features pretty much every day.

We are talking about maintaining and extending the platform on the daily basis and maybe for some companies that’s not the best model to put their hard work money in, right.

What are the benefits of using an existing AdTech platform to power a retail media network?

Michael Sweeney: Yeah, definitely. Alright, perfect, thank you gentlemen. So let’s kind of move on to the next option that companies have, which is using an existing AdTech platform to power your retail media network, right. And as Niraj’s mentioned at the beginning, there’s a lot of options that companies have if they wanted to use something that already exists.

So Radek, I’ll go back to you, what are some of the, I guess, advantages of this option, of using something that already exists to power your advertising business, essentially?

Radosław Kostecki: Yeah, I mean level of features, components that the first party or white label solution provides, it’s more clear to them. There are certain, obviously, limitations towards what they can actually do, but if also their workflow advertising business is not so well yet established, they can adjust the process towards the white label solution.

And they can just, using the features that the white label has, just simply do also some compromises between what they would like to achieve in the long run vs what is the critical flow for them. It can be done also in the custom world, but obviously here is the store is a little easier for them if they’re not yet aware how it might work for them.

So that’s why many vendors are also joining the retail media network business, I’ve seen a lot of new companies that advertise that they offer some retail media capability, it’s always important to look in detail what is beneath it, right.

Because some of them offer a very low level set of functionality, some of them are much more mature already, but this is an emerging channel, so everyone wants to join the party, right.

Niraj Nagpal: A lot of money at stake.

Radosław Kostecki: Yeah, yeah.

What are the drawbacks of relying on existing platforms for retail media networks?

Michael Sweeney: Definitely, excellent. And Greg, what are some the main disadvantages of using some that already exists vs., for example, building it yourself?

Grzegorz Łukaszewicz: I mean there are a couple. We see the trend not only in retail media network, but in the whole industry to try to go to your own solutions. That’s because the owning of the IP, I think it’s a big game changer, just owning a platform is again already, but also having an influence on the roadmap on the features on the integrations of the path of how it will extend, that’s pretty big freedom in terms of how the platform is utilized and how it’s extended.

Ready solutions will never give us that, we always rely on the road map that was created by the third party company that has multiple clients and their business may not necessarily align with our line of how we want to proceed and grow, right. So that’s a pretty big thing when it comes to using the third party platforms. It may be harder also to integrate with an existing stack that you have.

You need to have some sort of connection, at least on the reporting level, to be able to make sense of the data that you possess and you generate from the retail media network, so that may be a challenge for some of the companies as well.

And I think that the biggest one is this view that building the solution from scratch, let’s say, it’s way more expensive than using something ready. And that’s not necessarily true. It’s true, of course, when we are looking at it a short term, but the fees and the commissions that those third-party providers are applying on the contract are pretty high when you think about it and depending on when you want to meet your ROI.

That’s what you should look for when you decide if you want to use something ready or build something from scratch.

I guess that the last thing I want to say is it doesn’t necessarily must be either one or the other, right. You can always make a step-by-step approach where you integrate with something ready very quickly, because, as Radek mentioned, the time to market is a crucial advantage when it comes to the ready solutions, but you can build the system yourself in the background and just switch at the right time.

That’s one of the strategy that you can implement, right.

Radosław Kostecki: On the actual feed’s point Greg, this is actually something that kept my interest whenever we talked with different retailers or providers on the actual percentage.

Whenever I saw a number around, I don’t know, 20–30%, that was at least acceptable, I’d say, but when I saw and we heard even about 80% of the actual margin or 70, that’s getting quite high, to be honest.

Probably someone should even think about if it’s feasible to still pay them so much, maybe they should consider custom build.

Niraj Nagpal: Yeah, and I guess having control of your destiny and gradual manner might be a long-term best practice, but you say year one, year two, year three, you get your learnings, you establish a market presence, you hear what the advertisers want.

Because oftentimes they’re going to come to you at a left field what different reporting requirements that you didn’t think about, because it’s all new for everyone, then they’re gonna want to know some new insight that requires custom algorithms, or custom data storage to do an ETL to extract.

But that’s where you can start taking control of some parts of your destiny, while some parts that are co-monetized like UX, that’s very hard to get UX wrong, but once you have it right, you don’t want to change it too much either.

So there’s that balance to consider.

Michael Sweeney: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I guess when companies are considering either building something themselves or continuing to use any existing tool, obviously the considerations that we mentioned before are super important, such as that the technical maintenance and upkeep of the software, but certainly the economic factors would certainly play a huge role in an end.

I guess in some cases, it might not always be transparent in terms of how much a company’s paying to use the software right, especially with kind of talking about ad markup, etc., as well. But certainly, even if it’s 20%, right, 20% of 10 million dollars is a lot of money.

Niraj Nagpal: You can do the math?

Michael Sweeney: Yeah, I work in marketing, so math isn’t my strong point, but I’ve got a couple of developers on the call here who would certainly be able to crunch those numbers in their head faster than I could.

But yeah, even 20% of 10 million dollars, it’s certainly a lot of money and for that amount of money you could really build something really nice that kind of ticks all the boxes.

So I guess it is kind of one of the main considerations for companies and I guess, maybe historically, the option of building it yourself rather than using some that already exists.

I guess one of the things a lot of companies think about is the cost, right, because you’re essentially talking about many cases large costs initially, that’s a fairly significant capital investment you need initially to build the software, but over the long long run, you can essentially save a lot once you’ve, kind of, built it and incorporate everything you need as well. So there’s definitely…

Grzegorz Łukaszewicz: Yeah, there is one more point that is very important that it’s often missing. You don’t have to build a next biggest retail media network ever, right.

If you are building something for yourself, you can select a specific functionality, specific feature, specific reports, specific data that you want to collect just for your use case and that’s giving a huge flexibility.

And this software doesn’t really need to always have to be very big and very expensive, right. Of course if you want to fully fledged, fully featured platform, that’s a different case, but yeah, you can start small definitely and check all the checkboxes of things that you need and are useful for you.

Niraj Nagpal: And if you look at how these oftentimes come to market, the retail media network usually starts off as a secondary managed service, right. You get an insertion order from an advertiser, or a brand, or an agency and you run the campaigns, and you report back saying this led to XYZ actions, or sales, or whatever that the metrics are.

And then as you scale, you start maybe introducing some sort of self-service where people can log in directly and play around with reporting, or run their own campaigns.

And those are different use cases in different personas accessing your network and then oftentimes what you’ll find is have you just run out of inventory to sell, and so then you have to find ways to do something like all audience extension, or work with partners to leverage your data outside of your retail environment, or your booking platform, or what have you.

So then how do you do that, that’s a different challenge and different, you’re doing match tables, you’re doing data clean rooms, or you’re adding different components that you have to consider as well.

What considerations should companies have when deciding to acquire a business for its technology or user base?

Michael Sweeney: Yep, definitely. Perfect, all right. So yeah, we’ve kind of covered the first two options, either building it yourself with either your internal engineering team or partnering with an engineering company, or using something that already exists.

But as we mentioned at the beginning, there’s also a third option which is acquiring a business, right. And as you mentioned Niraj, this is something that happened particularly with telcos going back a few years ago. There were quite a lot of telcos that went down this path of they wanted to create an advertising business, they wanted to get into AdTech and the way they did that was through acquisitions.

I guess this is probably less common for retailers, generally speaking, like especially if we’re talking about the core technology to actually power the advertising business.

I guess this is kind of less common, but as you mentioned before with Walmart recent acquisition. that’s an interesting one because it’s not their core advertising product necessarily, it’s like something that they can add on top of it as well.

So kind of just tell us a little bit about, I guess, the advantages and disadvantages as well of acquiring companies for the tech.

Niraj Nagpal: If you’re a company that does off the shelf, or more like white labeling, maybe that’s your X or goal is to eventually get acquired by a retailer. And what you said, the point of that instead of be charging you 20, 30, 40% just buy me out completely and everyone’s happy days.

The history of AdTech acquisitions generally have not been very positive from telcos, we’re talking these 10+ billion dollars of acquisition that haven’t really worked out across the world, whether in Europe, or India or in the States with Verizon AT&T.

And so, they’re just not a good precedence of showing that actually working out and I think the retailers who are the next generation of AdTech platforms, or the super apps, that they’ve learned that really it’s more about their use cases instead of just buying market entry or more Acqui-hiring the right engineering talent.

‘cause eventually they will leave, or it’s not sticky enough for them to stay.

I think it’s a very unlikely option, but you do see some edge cases of Walmart buying Vizio for inventory expansion, or Roku buying dataxu to get some capabilities. Again, just the way to bash track that but it’s a very few one far between.

Maybe Criteo one day will be up for sale, there’s some pressures, but again, it’s wait and see at that point.

How have acquisitions in the AdTech space, such as those by telcos and other large companies, played out?

Michael Sweeney: Yeah, absolutely. I guess getting back to this kind of telco topic for a second there as well, as you mentioned the companies that acquired these AdTech companies, they didn’t, like the story didn’t kind of work out too well, right.

They ended up selling a lot of the tech off at a loss essentially, like lower than what they acquired for a few years earlier.

And I often wonder about this because I guess if you’re a telco or a retailer, right, and if you want to make an acquisition, right, especially of an AdTech company, what you’re essentially, and going back to some of the telco examples, those AT&T that are acquired AppNexus.

AppNexus was one of the largest advertising technology companies on the planet, so in that particular situation they acquired AppNexus with the goal of being to acquire the technology, but what they also acquired was an existing advertising technology business.

So I guess with acquisitions, you’ve got, generally speaking unless it’s an early stage startup where all they have is pretty much the tech, maybe not such a large user base.

But generally speaking, if you’re acquiring a large company, a mature AdTech company, you are paying not only for the tech, but also for the existing business.

Niraj Nagpal: Customer base.

Michael Sweeney: Yeah,  exactly, the customer base, and if you have no real interest in the customer base, then you’re just, kind of, wasting money, I guess.

It’s a different story if Criteo, as you mentioned before, gets acquired by another AdTech company, all the anti-competitive check marks and stuff aside, whether that actually goes through or not, but if another AdTech company acquires another AdTech company, they not only get the tech but they also get the user base which is equally as valuable for them.

When it comes to companies like telcos and retailers, they don’t necessarily need the user base, that doesn’t add as much value as the tech would.

So I kind of see it’s like that situation where the acquisition part, you need to essentially have, the value needs to provided across both the tech and also the user base that you’re also requiring as well.

If it doesn’t, then you could, again if we’re talking about large acquisition figures right in the hundreds of millions or billions, you could easily spend that. It’ll take you ages to spend that on custom software development, right, I guess so that’s kind of like nothing consideration.

Niraj Nagpal: Yeah, and I think what’s also kind of interesting occurring is now who are the buyers of the strategies you’re starting agencies. So Omnicom just made its biggest purchase ever entering the space in the US, I can’t remember how much, but I know it’s in the billions.

Publicis bought CitrusAd, right, to then in some ways pair it up with their offering with Epsilon.

So they have a retail story as well as a MarTech and AdTech story to help them win more business, or sell into those existing customer bases to what you’re, kind of, saying, you’re getting both. If you just want the tech, there’s probably maybe a different way to do it without that huge principal investment.

Grzegorz Łukaszewicz: And also, that doesn’t guarantee success either, who is able to buy a billion dollar worth company, another billion dollar worth company. So assuming that we are talking about huge companies with a huge complex process inside it, they will try to, usually, adjust this new acquired company to their systems, right.

Like financial, accounting, like management systems, everything that needs to be kind of put on the same level and this process is usually the killer that kills those kind of acquisition and make them unsuccessful pretty much, because it’s a very hard and long lasting process to, kind of, combine two big companies together, right.

Even if we are talking about the smaller companies, that’s even worse because let’s say the small company has a new tech that you want to acquire.

You need those people, those specific people that build the tech and there are a couple of them usually in the company that are very crucial and they may leave after the acquisition and you pretty much are left with a pretty good piece of software, but you can’t really use it.

You can’t really extend it without a huge resources put into it, so you’re going back to kind of reinventing the world the wheel here, right.

Radosław Kostecki: And that happens not only in the retail media network space or the big ones, but we’ve seen in even the past some of the acquisitions in the AdTech vendors, what was the reaction, and how they ended up.

I mean people from this organization came to other organizations and actually the only thing that has been left was the legacy tech which obviously worked and it’s had its values and also business relationship, but still it required a lot of customization and a lot of work on top of it.

But yeah, this is one of the paths that can be taken, right.

Niraj Nagpal: Right.

Michael Sweeney: Yeah, definitely. And I guess if you’re just acquiring a company just for the tech primarily and you’re spending hundreds of millions or billions of dollars on it, then good luck trying to improve ROI on that, that’s all I have to say.

Niraj Nagpal: Yeah, it’s been tough and fraught so far. What you see Walmart doing was that they’re partnering with a billion dollar AdTech company and they don’t.

Like they’re working with Trade Desk and that’s kind of the best of both worlds where they have a very successful AdTech company, but they can kind of be a big enough customer, they can influence roadmap, get their own version of it, etc., so it’s kind of a only few companies can do that as well.

Grzegorz Łukaszewicz: Yeah, it’s a very few companies that can have that kind of impact.

Michael Sweeney: Yep, definitely. But yeah, also as we said before as well, there are certain acquisitions that make a lot of sense as well. I guess, as we talked about, the key thing is to think about how the acquisition is going to fit into the overall strategy, and what value you’re going to get from the acquisition as well.

Especially when we’re talking about acquiring ad tech companies for the tech only and that kind of generally doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially if that company also has an existing user base that isn’t going to propel the company forward or kind of match with just the strategic goals as well.

So I guess that’s important to keep in mind as well when considering that option as well.

Niraj Nagpal: Yeah, and it could just be like the user bases in different countries and if I’m a US retailer only, that’s when you start shutting up that Japan operation down, or that Singapore-based operation done. It’s not necessary.

Michael Sweeney: Yeah, exactly. Alright guys, so yeah, that’s pretty much all the questions I had for today. Is there any other kind of final points, any other comments anyone else would like to make before we finish up?

Niraj Nagpal: I just think it’s more about being selective and intelligent and how you approach this at this with enough a three-year horizon now starting some best practices of how to build for this, how to prepare for the future.

If you’re on the fence of entering the space, know also that there are many companies that have entered retail media networks and have failed right, they just couldn’t get the traction of and advertisers are starting to reach a bit of a fatigue, especially in the US where they have dozens and dozens and dozens of different platforms need to log into.

And now we’re ending up with a new meta layer of DSPs, or they’re plugging into different retail media networks, right, so we kind of back where we started with SSPs and having an aggregation layer.

So there’ll probably be some consolidation as well, but again like understand why you’re entering the retail media network.

Are you investing it for the long run, are you able to bring it to market properly with the right sales team, training programs, user interfaces, reporting, ahead of time. Otherwise, it’ll just be an experiment and may not work out well.

Michael Sweeney: Yeah, absolutely, awesome. Okay guys, so yeah, thank you very much for your time today. If anyone has any questions about the topics we’ve discussed today, feel free to get contact with us.

Head over to qinshift.com or reach out to one of us on LinkedIn, I’ll add all the links to our LinkedIn profiles, contact information in the description below as well.

And once again, Niraj, Radek, Greg, thank you so much for your time today, it was a great discussion and look forward to doing this again with you all soon and continuing this topic of retail media. So once again, thank you very much.

Thanks everyone for watching and yeah, we’ll chat again soon.

Niraj Nagpal: Thank you.

Grzegorz Łukaszewicz: Thank you guys.

Radosław Kostecki: Thanks Mike.