The potential of retail mediahas been growing significantly in recent times. Industry projections predict that the global advertising revenue from retail media channels will surpass television revenue by 2028, representing 15.4% of total ad revenue.  

Zitcha Media, a full-stack tech platform that empowers retailers to seamlessly plan, activate, and optimize campaigns with advertisers, has been at the forefront, working directly with retailers to help bring all their media supply to market.  

Speaking to Retail4Growth, Troy Townsend, CEO – Zitcha, shares his insights on how retail media is redefining the marketing media space for both advertisers and retailers.  

Troy starts by explaining Zitcha’s positioning as a unified retail media platform. “We work directly with retailers to help bring all their media supply to market. We essentially work in three core buckets -on-site, off-site and in-store.”  

Sharing his observations on why retailers today need a media network, Tory says, “Globally, post-Covid there was a heavy utilization of e-commerce. But the trend we are seeing now is that e-commerce is possibly 10 percent or maximum15 percent of transactions for most omni-channel retailers. The rest of the transactions happen in-store. So retail media networks will become a core practice for every retailer to be competitive because they bring in high margins.” 

As Troy points out the retail media traction is in fact moving across categories. So while grocery has taken the lead, pharmacy, department, specialty and stores are also beginning to adopt retail media.  

Troy shares that across markets like Australia, New Zealand, UK, Europe, and in the US, more and more retailers are starting to understand the value of building a media network. But this also entails making structural changes that have implications, not only for them, but also for the advertising brands.  

Brands’ approach and shifting business dynamics 

In the context of brands who look atretail media as a potential marketing medium, Troy agrees there has been a gradual rise in the budgets. “We are seeing a large percentage of budgets starting to move into the space. I’d say it’s growing globally at about 20-odd %. Take a brand like Mondelez, about 8% of their global marketing spend is now directly going to retail media across different markets. Other big brands like say Procter & Gamble, Unilever or Kimberly Clark, are also starting to structure their teams, with retail media positioned between the trade or commercial teams and the marketing teams. So, I think we will see some fairly visible structural changes on the brands side too.”  

Further explaining the implications of retail media for brands and retailers, Troy explains, “Retail has always been a B2C business. But building a retail media network is B2B business; and for many retailers the big question is how do they build this into the core function of their business? The question assumes significance especially given that retail media has now moved beyond the ecommerce space and moving into the in-store space.” As he points out there is a need for joint business planning as advertising brands would also need to understand the core structure of the retailer to be able to unblock the revenue opportunity for media.

Integrating transactions  

Troy further says, speaking about how brands can get the best from retail media, “For people to want to spend money on retail media, it needs to have transactions built into it. You want to be able to have a product so that you can close the loop.” He also feels that the critical piece to build and expand a network is making sure that data is structured right. “It’s about making sure that things like loyalty platforms are well integrated into the networks.  It’s really about the ability to utilizeteam and technology todeliver results.”  

Further, sharing what it would take for a relatively new market to grow in terms of adoption of retail media or what factors ought to be in place in terms of the whole retail media eco-system, Troy explains, “Typically, you will need one major retailer to take the lead and the rest will follow – it’s basically the Domino effect that works in all markets. “ 

Key Markets and Expansion 

In terms of markets having big growth potential for retail media, US is among the key markets. In fact, Zitcha had recently announced that it had secured $15 million Series A funding, led by US investment firm VMG Partners, to accelerate growth in the booming North American retail media market. According to the Boston Consulting Group,  

US retail media revenues are forecast to grow to US$110-120 billion by 2027.   

Speaking about this, Troy says,“US has always been a big market for us, just as APAC is. And one of the reasons for this is that they were very heavily focused on e-commerce. And now a lot of those on-the-channel retailers are starting to look at opening up new revenue streams through offsite and in-store media. But there are not very many players in the space to enable that. That’s why we feel we can own that space in the US.“ 

Zitch also expanded to the UK and Europe recently, besides having a significant presence in APAC, “We have about 75% of all retail media networks here in Australia and New Zealand. So, we have a fairly good footprint here. And we feel that globally it’s going to expand further in a big way,” says Troy.   

So, any plans to tap the Indian market? Tory replies, “Yeah, it is definitely on our plans over the next 12 months tomove into the Indian market.”