From Data to Dollars: A Framework for Measuring In-Store Retail Media with Dan Hight, Placer.ai and Paul Brenner, Vibenomics

Tim Rowe:
Dan Hight, welcome back. Paul Brenner, it's your first time. We're going to ask you both to give a little bit of an introduction. But today's conversation is about a white paper that's being released in or around, right around the time that you're hearing this. It's, I think, really going to establish the framework for thinking through how we not only quantify the outcomes and impact of in-store retail media, But thinking about the currency that we use to trade the media that we're currently talking to advertisers about. So Dan Hight, Placer AI, Paul Brenner, Vibenomics, thank you both so much for being here. Thanks, Tim.

Dan Hight: Absolutely.

Tim Rowe: audience is probably a little bit familiar with Dan. So, Paul, I'm going to give you the mic first. Can you just give everyone a 30-second commercial, a little background on yourself, Vibenomics, and what we'll be talking about here today?

Paul Brenner: Did you just say that Dan is more popular than me?

Tim Rowe: I didn't say that officially. But I do if we go back and check, Dan might be the best performing episode ever. I don't want to say that officially without checking, but he's definitely the top five.

Paul Brenner: I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised. He's a very intellectual man. Yeah. So I'm Paul Brenner. Vibenomics were actually owned by a mood media, which is a global customer experience solution company. Fibonomics is the advertising ad tech and retail media division of that company. So my job is to really work with the retail media networks directly, strategy, technology, partnerships, all the things that enable, hopefully, monetization of the in-store assets.

Tim Rowe: Cause there's a lot of digital signage that gets hung, but it's that last piece that's really important. The monetization, we've got to make money. And Dan, the man who knows a thing or two about making money. Dan, Placer AI, welcome back. Give us a, give us the overview for, for maybe somebody who's listening for the first time. Give us the, the 30 second commercial on who you are and what Placer does.

Dan Hight: Sure. I'm Dan Hite and I head up our Advertising and Media Partnerships division within Placer. Placer is a location analytics and a market intelligence company. We work with everyone from commercial real estate and retailers to obviously now advertising companies and media companies and agencies. And I'm very proud to be partnering with Vibonomics in monetizing some of the in-store retail media solutions that we're going to be talking about today.

Tim Rowe: exciting stuff. Thank you both. We've got five questions for each of you, five questions for the both of you, and we're going to weave it into a conversation so that it's organic and useful and, and something that people can take with them into the battlefield that is advertising. And each day we hear more and more about retail media. So Dan, maybe I'll start with you on that one. What's behind this explosion of retail media as a category, do you think?

Dan Hight: Yeah, well, I think retail media just overall, because you can more closely associate the dollars put into retail media and the outcomes. I think that's one of the reasons why you're seeing so much growth that's happening. It's actually the fastest part of advertising overall. Traditionally, that's been thought of as an e-commerce perspective, but now increasingly the store and the assets that thousands of retailers have deployed throughout the country in terms of monetizing those and creating experiences. The other rise of retail media is because of where privacy has been going, and access to first party data is becoming a critical component, or the oil, if you will, for advertising. And so that's given a lot of rise to why we're seeing so much acceleration in retail media, for retailers having that, that relationship with customers and creating first party data.

Tim Rowe: Paul, we see a lot of different retailers and chains launching retail media networks and some are having tremendous success and others not so much. What have you seen in terms of the evolution, the ones that are finding success? What are the successful retailers doing?

Paul Brenner: Yeah, I work, I would say I work across at least 20 different, you know, well-known retail media networks. And even a well-known retailer doesn't mean they're a well-known retail media network, right? It always comes down to me, for me, is what their percentage of loyalty card participation is. So the higher the loyalty card participation, the more, you know, insights they can offer, right? The more rich the data. And that's kind of one. And the other is, you know, scale within their vertical. And so, you know, and I and I would give, you know, somebody at the high end like Kroger, 96 percent loyalty card adoption, you know, third, you know, top, you know, pure grocer by revenue, obviously a leader. And then you could look down the chain and you might see something like a, you know, a warehouse club that have, you know, pretty good adoption. of their data, but not the same footprint, right? And the same level. So, you know, that attracts more or less buyers. At the end of the day, you know, the revenue kind of follows those two, those two factors.

Tim Rowe: Make sense. Make sense. Dan, what are you seeing? How much of a, how much of a role is technology playing? Is it the ones who are leading the technology game or just outright winning? Is it about operational excellence and the ability to actually execute? Where do you see technology playing a role in the in-store retail media?

Dan Hight: Well, I think that Paul's point, the first party data through the loyalty card information is a key component to unlocking the value of a lot of the in-store. So that's certainly a major driver for retailers. And again, kind of to what I was talking about with the rise of retail media overall, it's access to first party data. So for sure, that's a big component of that. But obviously technology is a paradigm and we're various parts of that paradigm as kind of we speak. You have kind of these puts and takes. You have the challenge of privacy. And so you have more regulation coming in that's making some of that stuff challenged in certain areas. But then you have the cost of some of that infrastructure and some of the stuff even that Mood does in terms of deploying some of this infrastructure and technology inside the stores. is, you know, it's not for the faint of heart. There is a capital expense to this. And you can have more technology enveloped inside of a store. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to monetize that any better. It gets down to the scale of your network. It gets down to the, are you disrupting the customer journey and the customer experience? But there's a whole set of technologies. That's a big part of the white paper that we're that we're going to be releasing is really about technology to the roof, if you will, or to the store, and then technology under the roof or inside of the store. And that could be everything from, you know, obviously we have mobile location technology, which Placer relies a lot on, but you have a lot of in-store infrastructure, which could be everything from Wi-Fi to ultra wideband solutions to NFC to radar technology and RFD technology. There's a whole slew of technologies that stores can deploy inside of the store. It's not going to be a one-size-fits-all. And again, just because you have the best technology, you could have that in a store footprint that's relatively small and not necessarily be punching above your weight class. So I think it has to be done purposely. And obviously with a group of partners, it's probably not going to be something the retailer is going to be doing all themselves. And I think that's the paradigm that we're on right now.

Tim Rowe: What does that mean, Paul, under the roof?

Paul Brenner: You know, it's so funny because when we were drafting this white paper, Dan and I have been working together for a while now and working through the evolution of what it means to be in-store. How is it different than digital out of home and so on and so forth? Where Placer really set the bar higher with us was that confidence level of the amount of people within a period of time and dwell and things like that within the specific venue that we had. Historically, we've worked with people in the past that may or may not have. Included some of the perimeter of a parking area, right? Or, you know, it was. I think we started out here about five years ago with like a radius around a venue. Right. And then it kind of shrunk and shrunk and shrunk. And then, of course, you know, placers, you know, the best that that this kind of within the venue. And it really translates into where is the audience that is part of the loyalty program? Right. So under the roof, in the store, physically under the roof of the place where that loyalty user, that loyalty shopper is transacting. Right. So we need the accuracy of under the roof, literally like where placer is and then transactionally. Right. They're under the roof. And we actually the title is goes a step further and says to the roof, under the roof, roof and in the zone. So we really want to take on this, uh, you know, this IEB driven standard on zones taxonomy that lets you look at it at stored entirety, but also down into more of a category driven view. Um, so yeah, it's a little bit specific and a little bit, you know, relational when you think about under the roof.

Tim Rowe: Can you paint us, paint us a picture, give us a real world example, maybe combining all of those elements.

Paul Brenner: Yeah, I mean, you know, where Placer helps us is just, you know, the chains, right? And like people moving between different types of retailers and the relationships of people that may and do shop at multiple venues, which we support. So we would look at it as, you know, what's the journey of people, right, between these retailers and gives us some insight into that audience. And then you look at the number of people within a store, let's say it's a specific venue or a geography, a DMA, hourly views of what those people look like within the store, how many people we estimate that to be. And then using the presence, our partner, Squaviti, within this white paper, and combining both the foot traffic view and the presence view within that to create really a cohesive, as accurate as possible view of what is an impression, right? And that's really what I think the brands, at least going through the IB standards effort and being in a room with brands, they don't want to overcomplicate it. They want somebody to look, take technology, use technology that they may or may not understand all the nuts and bolts of it, but they're comfortable that companies who are good at this are taking that foot traffic and creating an impression by applying it to the amount of inventory that is available through audio. That's a quick kind of end-to-end, and I don't know if, you know, we've been working on this for a while, so.

Dan Hight: Yeah, I mean, I guess maybe even one step further on that. You can't reach, you know, so let's just say you're talking about a grocery store. You can't reach more people inside of the grocery store than are physically in the grocery store. Then from there, where you have your screens will be subjugated in terms of, hey, what percentage of the people were at the pharmacy? What percentage of the people were back at the freezer section? What percentage of the people were at the deli, you know, area? Everything there is going to be a subset of that, but that gets into the dwell time. That's some of what Paul was talking about with the IAB standards, with the zones, different areas of the store, again, based on dwell time and the number of ads that are being played ultimately gets down to the amount of impressions that are available in any particular area and then in totality at that location.

Tim Rowe: Interesting. It would seem that there's also the application then too of where to put the screens. Is this, is this also something that I can use as a publisher in a predictive way to determine where I should be putting screens?

Dan Hight: Sure, I think very much like even from a real estate perspective, right? It's you're going to put screens, you're going to put billboards, you're going to put signage where people are. And so there's natural, you know, amalgamations of people that are going to coalesce around certain areas. And that might be a good place to put a put a screen or a sign in there. You know, that has to be obviously balanced with the consumer experience. And I think these are some of the things that, you know, working with, you know, retailers and Vibenomics and Mood overall, I mean, that has to be weighed. The monetization aspect of things, but also not disrupting the normal consumer journey around that. That's a balance. That is for sure a balance.

Tim Rowe: No one really wants Blade Runner. No one wants that. It's not a thing. It's like, you know, we, we want things that help us, that educate us, that enable us to do more of the things that we're doing or to discover, right. Google's four key mic for a moment. It's just, it's really that simple. And I think that, that Paul, you touched on exactly that, that what brands are looking for is simplicity. How are they taking all there's, there's so much here. How do we distill it down and, and enable brands to activate with the story we're able to tell them?

Paul Brenner: Yeah, I think that's the, that's the approach we took on this white paper, right. Is, you know, and, and, and look, Dan and I, both of our companies were involved in this work with the IB. Um, and. You know, as it should be, there are a lot of options presented right in that and ultimately the retailers have to decide what they want to use and the brands have to show their comfort level with that through testing and growing. But we really tried to simplify this, simplify this down into, you know, how, you know, what is an impression? And I had this conversation with a brand while we were going through some committees. And, you know, I drew this picture on the board and I was like, here's audio, here's the work, the, you know, the flow of people, here's screens. And these people may be looking, maybe not. And they were just like, wait, it's too complicated. They're like, I buy OTT television. They tell me how many viewers might be watching. Like that's, that's what I get when I buy television, right? Like maybe I get more information, maybe I pay for more insights, but they're just telling me, they think about how many people are watching the shows. And that's really the approach we took with it was make it so impressions are accurate and trusted. Right. And it's like, let's bring this to market because when you, when we get to the measurement part of the discussion, I mean, none of the measurement. of a legacy in-store business, a paper sign or a, you know, a flagstand can be viewed as an impression and ultimately can't be viewed as, you know, attributable. You know, so we have to start with the very basics of what is that impression within the store. Then we can build on it with content, feedback, engagement, attribution. But if we don't get just that very starting point of a simple impression to a level where a brand can trust it and understand it, We can't get to the next 2, 3, 4, and 5 steps.

Tim Rowe: So what is that? How are we quantifying an impression in this white paper? Paul, you want to take that?

Paul Brenner: You can, Dan. Not all at once.

Dan Hight: How about both do it? Yeah, well, at the end of the day, as I kind of alluded to before, you can't reach more people inside of a store on any particular screen than kind of you have an upper bound, what you can reach. That's kind of the upper limit of what you can have. And then from there, it's basically like, okay, once you detect that there is presence in front of a screen, That can be done, again, through Quiddibi, one of Biobanomics' partners that detects presence of a person in front of that. Then you can calculate dwell time and then essentially the number of ads that are in rotation to get to the number of impressions that are viewed. It's simple math from that aspect. And that's essentially what this is. And again, whether you use computer vision like Qwidivi has, whether you use other sensor technology, something that senses that there is a body near that screen is a starting place to have. And just to Paul's point in terms of OTT or take traditional broadcast radio, take any other mode of advertising, Nowhere is the saying that this person actually viewed something. Because again, my TV could be on and I walked to go get, you know, refill up my drink. Well, the TV's still on. I'm not in the room because I just walked to the kitchen. Come back in and that's still an ad that was viewable because it was on the screen. Like at the end of the day, this is a closer proximity to what that is. But all of this is art and science. And at the end of the day, What marketers are looking for is confidence that this is something that is an established aspect, that I can correlate this back to other media that I'm buying, and that I'm going to ultimately measure my media all very much the same way. How much are I spending overall in marketing? Am I seeing an increase in aggregate sales? And that's a big part of where privacy is taking this conversation because Longer gone are the days of one-to-one targeting, and I saw what Tim did, and then I see kind of that full attribution all the way down the court. I think that ship has kind of sailed, and I think this is more of where people are moving to.

Paul Brenner: I would look, and kind of just to give the other side of what Dan is saying, I mean, if you look at the arguments that we get, against in-store, like on-site or off-site, you know, people are talking about one-to-one audience, you know, using zero pixel, right? Using some kind of, you know, attention tracking. And of course, you've got impressions, but then a subset of that is viewable impressions, right? That are, you know, even some lower quantifiable number, you know, within that. And the hiccup that we come across is in-store venues are considered a one-to-many experience, right? Just like radio, right? Just like television, and to some extent, which are measured through meters, or, you know, you know, a Nielsen rating system that might have, you know, less than 100,000 meter carriers that project the ratings of every country in America, which is weird. So we just kind of backed into it with the same thinking, which was, what's the most accurate sample size that we can get, right within a store by an hour, or in front of a viewable area to the IB standards. And then what is the content? It's 12 ads an hour. It's, you know, six minutes of loop at 15 second intervals. So taking that inventory and applying the math of who, what our actual audience size is to come up with an impression value for in-store so that we can say, Hey, just like, Hey, brand, just like you trust impressions from, you know, whether that be TV, radio, traditional media, digital, MFAs, if you believe MFAs. Everybody else has an audience. We need a simple view of an audience, and that's an in-store impression.

Tim Rowe: Paul, you mentioned a couple times in there audio. I don't know that I've been into a store ever and not heard something playing on the overhead PA system. What is the dynamic that audio plays in this relationship with digital signage in the context that we're discussing here today?

Paul Brenner: Hopefully it was really loud, so you could hear it really well.

Tim Rowe: I'm the guy that's singing along, but I don't know all the words, so I'm making up most of them. Probably pushing my shopping cart.

Dan Hight: It's a Tim Worstfloh song, right? Tim?

Tim Rowe: Yeah, probably. You and I shop at the same store, obviously. But what is that? What is, what is the relationship? You know, we've talked about it here on the podcast before of, of out of home and the radio and kind of the intimacy of audio in that setting and context. But what role does it play here?

Paul Brenner: Yeah, and radio is a good comparison, because you could view it as you could, you could think of it as a listener of a station, or you could think of it as background music, right? Like, you feel calmer in your dentist office when you hear light rock, you know, Jimmy Buffett, or Buffett. Yeah, you can do some. We started about six years ago really leaning in on a highly curated audience for Kroger, very targeted, specific to groups of stores, even down to zip codes for the audience that was their shopper. We started getting tons of feedback about people that were paying attention. I think they even started a Twitter channel about the Kroger music in store, about how much people loved it. Why? What was happening? It was personalized. It was specific to them. It was the choice of music by time of day. embracing new music. We have music programmers that spent their lives in radio or satellite radio. And so just really stepping back and saying, by time of day, we can estimate this is most likely the kind of audience. And if you're in California, you might be a little more indie to get their attention. And so most of it's pretty general. But I don't know, just constantly refreshing the music. constantly doing things. Then we did a project with a company that makes, you know, cartoons for a living in animation is their life. And we did some some music kits with them within the store, got some really feedback, good feedback about that effort. We've we announced the thing with the NFL last two years ago, where we do the NFL Red Zone on Sunday afternoons. You know, for content, we're working with some major music, some major country artists to bring some of their live content, custom content into some stores. You know, we're always on the content side. We're always trying to figure out ways to engage. And our marketing team does a great job surveying shoppers on a regular basis and getting really good feedback about how much they pay attention to just what they're hearing. Right. Because we want to know if people are paying attention at all to the audio. And then, you know, it's just like. it's just like radio or television. Like we want to make sure that the content's enough for people to be engaging and listening. So when the ad plays, yeah, we play the ad a little louder than we do the music. Right? It's just like any radio station. Right. And you know, I'm not going to turn that off. Then we test it. We test it on a control test for attribution. We test audio recall through post-campaign surveys, brand awareness surveys of shoppers through our partnership with Susie Market Research. So, yeah, I mean, it has to be a complement to the environment. It has to be informative, engaging. Entertaining. It all kind of goes together. It really is no different than programming and other media. So when you play the ads, they're not tuned out, so to speak. The best one are whether it complements other parts of the campaign. We did a study with Microsoft last year where we used PLA activation on-site complemented with in-store audio off the same campaign. It was a yogurt brand. And we saw a 50% increase in performance against their competitors when they used consistent media planning, including in-store audio. So standalone, other digital tactics As you know, compared to in-store only and then combining those two were the by far the most impact in their sale.

Tim Rowe: So that's incredible. You said the a word in their attribution and you gave us a little tease there. What is the, yeah, what is the, I guess, kind of. What's the big reveal behind attribution? I mean, 50% lift for a yogurt brand is obviously incredible when, Hey, here's the playbook, just run the playbook. What is it always the same? Is it, is it category specific? What do you see? Give us maybe some, some success stories that are worth sharing.

Paul Brenner: Yeah, I would say it's, you know, it's seasonal. Um, it's category specific. It's. Competitive timing, right? Trying to grow share of category in a specific time period. You know, we have people that look at what might be a downtime for them, right? Where they're trying to be competitive and share category. That can be, I mean, we've done different. I mean, you gotta think about, like, go back to the beginning, loyalty data, right? Like, what do you know? You know generally who the person is, you know, what's their, you know, what's their basket size look like? What's their spending per trip look like? What's their spending per household look like? And you look at that across, you know, all of the ways they buy, click list, you know, delivery in store, clearly 80% plus is still in store. So the successes are easier to find. because the greater amount of spending is occurring within the store. Right. So just like statistically, we can make a big difference because that's more of the spent. Right. So we just did a study with someone. I can't say the name, but they make a really popular sandwich spread. And, you know, we got them a seven percent increase in sales over a category of two percent. So they outperform their own category by 5% in units sold during our test period. So, you know, if it's done correctly. I don't know what our average is. I wouldn't even want to put it out there on this podcast. But, you know, we've seen adult beverage as high as 40 percent lift. But we've seen others where they were perfectly happy with, you know, a two percent increase in households because that times the number of, you know, months of spending, they were ecstatic in the value. So it's almost like you have to carve up the ways that loyalty data can give those insights. and then look at the goal of the brand and say, is it seasonal? Is it category comparison? Is it new product distribution? There's no one size fits all on that. It really comes down to the accuracy of impressions correlated to store data and how you make that story come out at the end. Right? And so they're all different. I hate to give a general percentage lift because that's not always the story they care about.

Tim Rowe: It would be a trap question if I asked, yeah.

Dan Hight: So I think that those are- All of endemic and non-endemic. Obviously the attribution for non-endemic is very different from that aspect. And we think about the aspect of, let's just take grocery for instance, that's a big category and kind of retail media. The grocery store is usually the anchor of any shopping center. But that store, you know, wants to make sure it's a vibrant shopping center. And I remember back in, you know, when I was, you know, 15 years old and working in a grocery store in the back of the register tapes was all the different coupons for all the, you know, the dry cleaner and the car wash and the burger place, all that shopping center, because the more trips coming to the shopping center, the more likely you are to go back into that grocery store to pick up something. So that non-endemic aspect of things is a very important aspect. And that's a way also to tie in the retailer's first party data to other things that also are going to be kind of those life stage events. And mixing that balance of non-endemic and endemic is obviously an art and a science as well.

Paul Brenner: Yeah, one of our biggest recurring non endemics is one of the largest cell phone companies that we travel. We basically move around as they do pop up kiosks in the grocery stores. And so we drive traffic. It's considered non endemic, right? And so they have a traveling pop-up kiosk, and we do that. We have, you know, elect, you know, smartphone pay companies that want to, you know, target specific markets for higher use of that. So, yeah, there are, they have to be applicable to the environment, right, Dan? Either that's, you know, something that's not endemic but feels localized, right? Something like that. 90% of what we do is endemic today.

Tim Rowe: Paul, my, my media owners, my publishers would tie me up and lock me in a closet if I don't ask this question. Do you have any recommendations, best practices around loop structure? Should it be all ads? Is it a mix of content and ads? Is there a right recipe for the digital signage that you, that you do say?

Paul Brenner: Yeah. The recipe is one part dwell time. Right? An important part. And two parts content, I guess I would say, right? Like, if you if we so I would take a store and I would I would use Dan's placer data, not Dan's data.

Dan Hight: Placer data.

Paul Brenner: Don't use my data. My data's not good. It's data bad. Placer data good. Uh, you know, we look at the hourly foot traffic within that one store. Right. And then we, we use his numbers to look at dwell time on a venue by venue basis. And so we actually build a very intelligent algorithmic. Approach to this, right? IOT devices in the stores, um, web-based algorithms that says, you know, here's an hour. We want to make sure that there's a good balance of promo marketing for the, for the merchant. Right. Let's keep them happy. and add spend, add inventory with enough behind it to make it valuable. Right. And so if you look at one hour, if I had a grocery store with a 24 minute dwell time, you know, usually we're going to end up with no more than nine minutes of spoken word. Right. And that's usually going to be about 12 ads an hour and six sell promo an hour. And then we'll throttle that based on how much a retailer wants to throw in like a live moment, right, where they have like a specific minute live moment. And then we really just mold that with the brand, the merchant and the retail media together. We walk into with an open mind. And, you know, lower time, lower dwell times, a little more frequency, right? 24 ads an hour, because you want to make sure, you know, you get that person in there, the longer the dwell time, like we have some where it's like 35 minute dwell time, say it's a makeup company or something like that. We'll get down to as little as six ads an hour. So it's all driven by dwell time, you want a good associate experience, you want a good, you know, shopper experience, but you also want to have enough inventory to monetize.

Tim Rowe: Retail is in the detail. Gentlemen, I can't thank you both enough. Where can we find the white paper? I'm sure that we'll have it linked close by to this podcast. I know you're both going to be speaking at some upcoming events. Dan, give us the roadshow. We know that there's a whole tour behind this white paper. What's coming up?

Dan Hight: Yeah, so the white paper will actually be released right before the Path to Purchase Retail Media event conference is coming up in Chicago at the end of June. So, and Paul and I and Mitch from QDB will actually be doing a panel conversation relative to the white paper at that conference. And then the white paper will be released right before that conference. And obviously we'll have it, you know, posted on our website. I'm sure Vivanomics and QDB will have it posted on theirs as well.

Tim Rowe: Excellent. We'll make sure that it's easy to find. Absolutely.

Dan Hight: Yeah.

Paul Brenner: It'll be all in our linkedin for sure. Yeah. And the panel is moderated by our good friend Alicia Esposito. Shout out Alicia. Yeah, shout out to Alicia, because she's really good. And she agreed to to be on that with us and keep us in line. Good luck with Dan. We'll be publishing that. And, you know, we have a series of events, whether it's, you know, the speaking engagement. We also have some some other things we hope to announce soon after that. You know, the wave is here. We're just we're trying to catch it, you know. So hopefully there'll be there'll be more than just a white paper release and a and a and a panel. So I'm sure that there will be it's been fun. It's been fun, fun. Thank you both.

Tim Rowe: This has been awesome. Thank you. I thank you guys and audience. Thank you. If you found this episode to be helpful, please share it with someone who could benefit as always, make sure to smash that subscribe button. We'll see y'all next time.