14.02.2025 |

Twelve | Digital Transformation: Retail Media in the age of AI, hyperpersonalisation and unified commerce

Profile picture from Carina Mueller

Carina Mueller

General Manager Retail Media & Commerce, Mediaplus Group

Is retail media the best way for brands to create a consistent, seamless customer experience and boost sales? Carina Müller, General Manager of Retail Media & Marketplaces at Mediaplus Performance, sheds light on the opportunities and issues that this involves – using fruit juice and beverage manufacturer Eckes-Granini as a real-life example. Store closures and empty shop windows are an increasingly common sight in Germany’s city centres. The demise of bricks-and-mortar stores is not only giving retailers a hard time but also means that brands are deprived of all-important points of sale. And the blame for this development is often automatically laid at the door of online retail. Over the past few years, Amazon – with its 24/7 availability and same-day delivery – has radically rewritten the rules of retail. In more ways than one…

"With the use of artificial intelligence and real-time data, individualising messages and offers is reaching a new dimension. The keyword here is 'hyperpersonalisation'“.

Retail media: a lifeline for brands

In 2023, Amazon generated 47 billion US dollars from ad revenues alone. Retail media is a booming market. In Germany, the market volume is already 1.7 billion euros and is expected to grow by a further 20% every year. So doesn’t it make sense for retailers to grab a slice of the ever-growing pie for themselves?

With retail media, popular German retailers like Rossmann, Schwarz Media, REWE, Douglas and MediaMarktSaturn are opening up their digital and stationary advertising spaces – which range from e-commerce websites to apps or PoS networks for brands and manufacturers – and offering them urgently needed new ways to appeal to customers. After all, trouble is not only looming in bricks-and-mortar retail, but also online: due to data protection and browser restrictions, standard cookie-based techniques are no longer particularly efficient in digital marketing and only reach a section of users. Because of this, brands and their agencies are being called on to rethink their digital campaigns.
Retail media offers are opening up wide-ranging options here. The main focus is on valuable first-party customer data, which also provides insights into purchasing behaviour. The legitimate data generated from customer profiles makes it possible to customise marketing measures to the purchasing behaviour and interests of individual consumers – which is a clear advantage over conventional advertising channels.

Retail media at Eckes-Granini

One company that is consistently using retail media to develop its business is Eckes-Granini in Germany. Located in the country’s Rhine-Hesse region, the company is represented in the food retail sector with an extensive product portfolio of fruit juices and beverages. By using retail media customer data, Eckes-Granini is able to focus its advertising on potential buyer categories related to the purchase of juices and vitamin waters from their hohes C product range. The diversity and granularity of the categories and clusters enable them to identify suitable groups of people based on their purchasing behaviour and to target them directly.

At Eckes-Granini, all the company’s customer-oriented segments are connected. This means that, in an ideal scenario, they can offer a consistent, seamless customer experience across all channels – like their website, social media and bricks-and-mortar stores. Yet many of the old problems have remained, including the ongoing challenge of selecting and evaluating data.

Here, the data doesn’t just need to be of a high quality but must also be available in a structured form. Basically, advertisers need target group data and regional data for buyers and potential buyers, as well as analyses of what are termed ‘cross-interests’. Tech-savvy target groups – for example the kind of people who buy smartwatches – are often also interested in all kinds of fitness and exercise products. In many cases, buyers of fashion who prefer clothing made from environmentally friendly fabrics also pay attention to sustainability credentials when purchasing items for their home. Retail media can identify these people. The retailers’ shopping carts and shopping data are usually better than the target group data that a conventional marketer of a medium can provide. This is a great opportunity for retailers as it allows them to describe new target group clusters that are a perfect match for the advertisers’ products and to differentiate them sufficiently.

The second hurdle is creating an efficient and intuitively designed customer journey: complicated user navigation and an insufficiently automated data exchange can quickly cause consumers to abandon their shopping carts, particularly in the FMCG sector. If the online availability of a product is not displayed in real time, this leads to disappointed customers and missed revenues. As well as this, stricter data protection regulations and outdated backend systems are making it difficult to exchange data.

From omnichannel to unified commerce

The omnichannel model has proven to be inadequate in solving this problem on its own. Unified commerce goes beyond that. The main difference to omnichannel is in the real-time linking of all potential data points along the entire customer journey – both online and offline. Retail media advertising shown online can draw attention to products sold in bricks-and-mortar stores. This real-time integration helps to increase sales as well as creating a smooth, consistent customer experience. Consumers and brands alike benefit from having an improved, individualised and seamless shopping experience that is exactly the same across all touchpoints.

Hypersonalisation using AI

With the use of artificial intelligence and real-time data, individualising advertising messages and offers is reaching a new dimension. The keyword here is ‘hyperpersonalisation’, which goes well beyond standard personalisation, by using detailed customer data like surfing behaviour, purchasing history, location and predictive analyses to create content, recommendations and offers tailored precisely to individual people. Using AI is the only way to select and process data quickly here.

A specific example of this is digital coupons in apps, an area where Eckes-Granini is also active. Last year, the company – together with a retail partner – already launched a coupon campaign backed up with a checkout-based retail media CPM placement. The campaign mechanics integrates the stationary data directly into the customer journey and enables complex targeting. This in turn specifically addresses the needs of price-sensitive customers within the context of their interests and locations. Here, users and revenues are connected via digital or scanned till receipts. After this, personalised advertising content can be displayed via retail media inventories in-app, on-site or off-site, as well as on Connected TV (CTV).

The findings gained from this campaign proved extremely valuable for the company. More than anything, they provided key insights into purchasing behaviour and helped to better understand and optimise the effectiveness of the advertising measures used. Increasing conversion rates prove that, after being shown the advertising, people did actually carry out a desired action such as making a purchase.

So should brands be focusing all their energy on retail media? Yes and no. Of course only as part of the overall media mix and only if they are suitably prepared. After all, retail media is a lot more complicated for brands than mere online advertising. Many brands are in a business partnership with retailers and are faced with the challenge of effectively coordinating their sales and marketing targets with one another. For advertisers, it is also important that the advertising impact of retail media can be compared with other channels so performance can be measured across the board.

Well-structured first-party data is expensive if you don’t own the data yourself. And the technologies for real-time links and AI analyses are not exactly cheap at the moment either. What we need now is for retailers to provide, in the mid-term, a technical infrastructure for their business that meets market-compatible standards and offers suitable interfaces.

Ultimately, it's the consumer who decides

It remains to be seen whether hyperpersonalised advertising can be equally as effective in all age groups. While the younger generations like Gen Z and Gen Y want advertising that is relevant to them along their digital and stationary customer journey, older generations with a greater awareness of data protection might see a personalised customer journey as an invasion of their privacy. 

Eckes-Granini is also facing the challenge of striking a healthy balance between more broadly-based targeting and personalised, individualised communication and regularly monitoring it. There needs to be a balance between added value and cost so that the company remains profitable – and this includes its personalisation activities.

At the end of the day, it’s the cost-benefit ratio that decides: do increased revenues, positive brand effects and a higher campaign ROI justify the investments in infrastructure and the creation of personalised content? One thing’s for certain: in a cookieless world, retail media builds a bridge to consumers and can lead to increased sales. Unified commerce and retail media could finally deliver on the long-awaited promise of turning digital marketing into a data-based, customer-centric model.


More information about Mediaplus Retail Media Services.

First published in TWELVE - the Serviceplan Group magazine for brands, media and communication.