Adam Berkowitz, Chief of Staff at LiveIntent chats about the latest trends redefining retail media in this quick catch-up:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Adam, tell us about yourself and your role at LiveIntent…take us  through LiveIntent’s core offerings…

I’m the Chief of Staff at LiveIntent. I work directly with the CEO to both articulate the vision and mission of the company and put it into action. I’ve worked across the organization in order to do so. I oversee Marketing as part of this function. Chief of Staff was a very hot title a few years ago, but now has become a catch-all title to refer to anyone who works in any role at the company. I’m too lazy to change it.

The vision of LiveIntent is pretty simple: We connect brands to people using cookieless email-based solutions. Brands and Publishers work with us to leverage to grow their business and maximize their revenue across email and the web.

Email is weird in a good way! Most technologies are ephemeral, but email flourishes no matter what changes in the ecosystem.

What we’ve learned from our Publishers (which includes both traditional publishers and brands who send email) is that once a brand’s email alerts and newsletters get going, they quickly become the workhorse of CRM and the predictable revenue they create is too powerful for them to ignore. That’s what’s behind the explosive growth of email newsletters in recent years.

Because of this market dynamic, LiveIntent has expanded what we deliver to our partners: advertisers and publishers. We started out as a smarter way to buy and sell ads in email, which we continue to proudly offer to our massive customer base. However, what we’ve learned is that email is no longer only about sending and receiving email: You need email to download an app, sign-up for Facebook, sign into Alexa, or buy from Amazon: you can’t do anything of substance online without an email address.

Point is, the email address is the key to Identity in a mobile-first world where respecting privacy is paramount. The email address is a digital passport. With this, marketers can target customers on the web, in social, across CTV, etc and perform lookalike modeling. The email address is cross channel and cross device which makes it core to personalization and customer relationship management. LiveIntent has focused R&D in recent quarters to help publishers and advertisers leverage the power of email wherever people are present and paying attention, not just the inbox.

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We’d love to hear your thoughts on the email evolution in B2B and B2C and how specially retailers are benefiting from email and automation to reach audiences?

Retail media networks turn retailer first-party data and inventory into a powerful new revenue stream. Retail media unlocks an opportunity to reach in-market shoppers with relevant ads across retailer-owned, in-demand inventory and channels. GroupM estimates that retail media advertising will increase 60% to $160 billion by 2027. As the demand for performant Retail Media inventory surges, so too does the need for retailers to have expanded addressable inventory.

Wheresoever shall they turn? To email, of course. LiveIntent lets retailers expand addressable inventory into their email newsletters and alerts, tapping into intent-driven audiences who are in a logged-in, targetable, measurable, and performant channel.

Retailers are facing the the same stark choices that impacted Publishers and Brands during the era of walled garden hypergrowth. Retailers have to balance growth with maintaining control over their own destiny. By sitting at the intersection of marketing and media, LiveIntent is able to deliver on the next generation of needs for retailers and e-commerce brands.

What are some of the communication channels and trends dominant within retail / retail media today?

We’re seeing that retail media are truly embracing their roles as Publishers. They are aping Publishers when it comes to the email channel. Publishers have, in recent years, re-devoted resources to the email channel. Why not? It’s a logged-in audience that they own, outside the grasp of Facebook.

Brands have seen the light and now also hire legit editorial talent for their email newsletters. That’s because brands now see the value in it like publishers did. So, we see the tenor and nature of email from brands to have a more creative, light, content focused tone, rather than just a hard sell.

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Take us through some of the top email fails you’ve seen in the industry and the biggest takeaways from those?

The biggest fails we’ve seen aren’t of the “fun” bad creative or bad subject line, it’s on the enterprise level. We see too many brands who send email using a one-size-fits-all approach to mailing. LiveIntent’s data science team has determined that, for most Publishers, ~10% of lists create ~90% of the engagement with their emails. Yet, many brands who send email  cater not to their power users, but to their least engaged users.

Brands who send email should obviously not offend the least engaged customers, but they shouldn’t upend the apple cart to appeal to them. Brands who send email  should segment and treat their different audiences differently.

We see brands who send email make twice as much by mailing their engaged customers more often, and mailing their less-engaged less, and still end up sending about the same amount of email. It’s just a matter of paying close attention and changing up the mix.