The study reflects marketers’ plans for increased investment in retail media despite macroeconomic and measurement challenges

Skai, a leading omnichannel marketing platform, has released its annual State of Retail Media study exploring the current and future challenges and strategies identified by marketers as they navigate retail media advertising. The study was conducted in collaboration with BWG Strategy, an advisory organization that helps brands, manufacturers, and retailers plan and execute their ecommerce strategies.

Within just a few years, retail media has become the third-largest digital advertising channel behind paid search and social, and is projected to continue to grow at an astonishing pace.

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In the State of Retail Media 2023 report, Skai asked brand marketers for perspectives on investment trends, campaign activation challenges, measures of impact, retailer prioritization, data usage, and how to coordinate retail media with other advertising channels. Notable findings include:

• Managing multiple retailers remains a challenge, with 50% of respondents saying they have invested or plan to invest in a third-party platform like Skai to help. Skai continues to respond to this challenge by adding support for new networks and AI-powered automation capabilities to the platform. Using Skai, advertisers can today plan, activate and measure programs across more than 100 retailers in one place.
  
  
• 77% of advertisers are happy with retailers’ data-sharing capabilities, but less than half are actually using data like share of voice (SOV) metrics or competitive insights most crucial to retail media success. To help advertisers capitalize on valuable data opportunities, Skai has released a new Competitive Insights dashboard enabling deeper analysis of the factors affecting retail media SOV. The dashboard provides competitor keyword and product level intelligence for a comprehensive understanding of how brands stack up against competitors and more nuanced, effective optimization and decision-making.
  
  
• One of the most daunting challenges faced by 37% of respondents is proving the incremental impact of their retail media investment; failure to do so could slow plans for growing the channel. Through Skai, advertisers can now run limitless, customizable Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) reports that parse Amazon’s huge data sets into easy-to-read visualizations making it easier to understand Amazon campaign incrementality. These reports go beyond standard last-click attribution in the native platform to unlock multi touch models and further insights into customer behavior and journey for performance optimization.
  
  
• 91% of respondents report coordinating retail media activity with other digital ad channels. That’s easier than ever on Skai’s recently launched omnichannel platform, which features holistic planning, testing, activation, and optimization within and across walled gardens. Now advertisers have access to all supported publishers across channels for one flat fee, along with new AI capabilities for better forecasting, budget planning, creative management, and keyword recommendations.

“The advertising world changes fast, and we’re dedicated to improving our capabilities just as quickly. These recent innovations are designed to help advertisers on our platform respond decisively and intelligently to changing market conditions and performance results, giving marketers an edge over their competitors,” said Guy Cohen, Chief Product Officer at Skai. “Our latest updates solve many of the challenges that respondents identified in our 2023 State of Retail Media study.”

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