Retail Media Networks are generating billions of dollars, but not all brands benefiting from them equally.
Agility requires more than just shifting budgets to the newest channel; it demands a fundamental rethinking of how internal teams collaborate and how technology is applied to the unique environment of retail.
Today, we’re going to talk about the nuanced reality of Retail Media Networks. They represent one of the biggest shifts in marketing, but many brands are finding that the playbook from traditional digital advertising doesn’t quite translate. We’ll explore why simply plugging in programmatic tools isn’t the silver bullet it’s promised to be, how to navigate the internal budget battles between trade and media teams, and what it really takes for AI to deliver on its potential in a retail context.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome, Dave Simon, President of In-Store Marketplace at ISM.
About Dave Simon
David Simon, EVP of Advertising for Mood Media and President of Vibenomics and In-Store Marketplace (ISM), is a seasoned ad tech executive with extensive experience driving programmatic advertising growth across mobile app, CTV and web platforms. As former Chief Revenue Officer at Fyber, he led the mobile app ad monetization platform from $100 million to $500 million in revenue before its acquisition by Digital Turbine. His career spans leadership positions at Moloco, Jounce Media, Verizon Media, Vidible (acquired by AOL), Turn, Right Media and Yahoo. Simon specializes in programmatic strategy, marketplace development and bridging supply-demand gaps in retail media advertising.
Dave Simon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidjsimon/
Resources
ISM: https://instoremarketplace.com/
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Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom: Retail media networks are generating billions of dollars, but not all brands are benefiting from them equally. Agility requires more than just shifting budgets to the newest channel. It demands a fundamental rethinking of how internal teams collaborate and how technology is applied to the unique environment of retail. Today, we’re going to talk about the nuanced reality of retail media networks. They represent one of the biggest shifts in marketing, but many brands are finding that the playbook from traditional digital advertising doesn’t quite translate. We’ll explore why simply plugging in programmatic tools isn’t the silver bullet it’s promised to be, how to navigate the internal budget battles between trade and media teams, and what it really takes for AI to deliver on its potential in a retail context. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Dave Simon, President of In-Store Marketplace at ISM. Dave, welcome to the show.
Dave Simon: Thanks for having me, Greg. Great to be here.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, looking looking forward to talking about this with you. Definitely definitely a lot of people talking about this, so um I’m sure a lot of interest here. Before we dive in though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at ISM?
Dave Simon: Sure. I’ve been in digital media and adtech, you know, since probably 2007. I traded my first programmatic impression in uh February of 2008.
Greg Kihlstrom: Nice.
Dave Simon: At the time, the market size of programmatic was the value of that one impression. So
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, that was early days, right? Yeah.
Dave Simon: It was early early days, yeah. Um, but you know, look, I’ve been very fortunate in that I was at the first exchange, right media. I was at the first DSP called Turn. And and they were sort of the early parts of the market. And in particular, one of the the greatest things about my time at Turn is that I I got I was I ran business development and partnerships. So, I got to meet with, you know, 2,000 companies in the space and understood how to sort of curate a partner ecosystem inside the platform and as a result of that, I got a really good understanding of how the the pieces work. So, I’ve worked in in the the web space, the CTV space, the mobile app space with most recently with a company called Mako. And then I saw the um the the change in retail media coming and sort of decided to jump in and joined uh in store marketplace team back in in April of last year. And you know, the interesting thing is that in store marketplace is the ad platform for retailers to use to manage their in-store ad inventory as part of their overall retail media experience. And so if you’re a retail media company or a retail media network and you’re offering, you know, ads on on your on site search, on site display, you’re shipping your data into social platforms and into CTV platforms for offsite. And then you have your in-store experience, which is really the last mile before a customer makes a purchase decision. And, you know, e-commerce is important. That’s not that’s not downplay that. But the fact is that if you’re a grocer, over 90% of your products are sold in store. And so when in-store marketplace was going through this transformation of trying to figure out how to really sort of add operationalize the in-store shopping the in-store ad experience. Uh, they were acquired by a company called Mood Media. And Mood Media is the largest provider of in-store experiential services. Uh, we power about 500,000 retail locations with in-store audio. Uh, we’ve done everything from three-story visual LED build outs at the flagship Victoria Secret store on Fifth Avenue to, you know, drive-through digital menu boards to in-store music for you know if you’re my age, you know Abercrombie’s smell and the music in the store. That’s all done by Mood Media. And so the nice thing is that we have a subset of our customers of that 500,000 for whom retail media is really important. And our platform plugs seamlessly into the workflows that exist there. So, it’s been a it’s been a phenomenal last year or so. The momentum heading into 2026 around in store is really picking up steam. Uh, and so it’s a really exciting time to be here.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, love it. So yeah, let’s let’s dive in and want to start from the strategic aspect of this and talk a little bit about that tension between trade marketing and retail media budgets, which is often a major hurdle for CPGs. From your vantage point, you know, what’s the fundamental misunderstanding between these two teams or or areas and why does treating them as separate P&Ls create such a strategic blind spot for a brand?
Dave Simon: Yeah, I mean, so look, it’s it’s a, you know, I I say this with tongue and cheek a little bit. It’s easier for me to sit there and say, oh, just combine your trade and your R&M teams, not, you know, that’s a really complicated and risky proposition for most retailers. With that said, if you look at it from the lens of media, not from the lens of like your trade arrangements and sort of the legacy businesses, which you have to figure out how to navigate effectively. But I’ll take you back, you know, maybe 15 years ago to most of the major media companies when programmatic was still sort of an earlier thing. What we saw was that there were really sort of two, there’s a bifurcation in the in the business. You had like take Conde Nast. If you wanted to sell a very fancy high impact, high quality ad inside of the Vogue magazine, right? Gucci spends money there, Prada spends money there. You’ve got a a sales rep at Conde Nast who owns the relationship with the marketing decision makers at Gucci or Prada.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah.
Dave Simon: And as, you know, and then they had vogue.com. And whatever the sales team didn’t sell, it fell down to programmatic. And then you had people like me and AdOps people who were trying to figure out how to create demand density in that system. And the attitude of most media executives early in the programmatic days was, I’ll just flip this on, it’s some technology thing, I don’t really understand it. I don’t want it to touch my core business because I don’t want it to disrupt anything. So like whatever I squeeze out of there is great. Well, what happened was buyers expressed the preference of buying programmatically as opposed to direct IO. They they had more optionality, they had more technology, they had more data. And so the bigger programmatic got, the more pressure it put on this direct sales button. But the problem was that it wasn’t necessarily revenue pressure. It was also like workflow and in legacy relationship pressure. And so when you fast forward to when CTV became programmatic, it took web 15 years to really work out that dynamic. It took CTV five years. You know, if you look at a lot of the CTV inventory now, a lot of it is programmatically traded. Now, most of it’s programmatically traded inside of a deal. And so there is still some semblance of a relationship and an actual sale and a conversation with the brand about how you can achieve their objectives. But the programmatic piece is simply a workflow. If I look at what most retail media networks have done, they’ve done one of two things. They’ve either taken their data, shipped it into a DSP, and then let buyers buy that data across third-party inventory, which is a nice way to make money and it’s highly incremental, and it’s very large scale. But what we haven’t seen yet is a a brand come up with a strategy that says, okay, I have a new product packaging, I have a new KPI, I have a new sales objective. How do I achieve that objective across the entire set of products that these retail media networks have? Now, many retail media networks might disagree with me when I say that. What I mean by that is that I have yet to see a program that a brand buys that works the same way as a brand putting money into any of the Google self-serve products. You know, when you buy Meta, you say they say, what’s your goal, what’s your budget, give me your creative, and get out of my way, my machines will take care of it. That’s the one extreme. On the other hand, you’ve got like this really complicated, I’ve a part of my budget’s in trade, part of it’s in store, part of it’s in social, part of, you know, and you launch new tactics to try and generate incremental revenue. But the fact is that there’s no unified sitdown to say, how do I achieve your objectives? And part of that is because the retail media networks don’t really know how well each of their products perform. It’s really hard to build a portfolio when you just look at things through line item by line item. And so the brands have to get better at measurement and defining for the retailers what matters. The retailers have to get better about sharing data around outcomes, particularly SKU-level data. And then you can really build this program. And so I I say it like, let’s get there quickly because that is the silver bullet, but it’s it’s not easy. We’re talking about large organizations whose core business is to sell products. It’s not to run media businesses. And so there’s a learning curve here that every media company went through.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I mean, and given that, you know, you’ve described a little bit of the the unified approach there. But, you know, how can a brand get started there, you know, breaking down whether it’s breaking down silos or, you know, to your other point, teams aren’t necessarily going to change or some of the existing relationships aren’t fundamentally going to change. But, you know, where where does a brand start in creating a more holistic investment strategy versus thinking about these things in silos?
Dave Simon: Yeah, I mean, look, I think that if if I were running a big brand budget, I would start with a tentpole. I would take a moment where I’m going to invest a lot of money. I wouldn’t look at my up front, I wouldn’t look at my GPP, I wouldn’t start there. I would say, I’m Anheuser-Busch, I have a significant investment around the Olympics.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah.
Dave Simon: What’s my goal? And the goal there’s going to be more than one, right? You’re going to have like brand recall, new product to household. You’re going to have SKU level sales lift in individual Geos or individual states or individual store store banners. But you got to sort of define what those KPIs are. And then the thing that I’ve also found, and this has been true for, I don’t know, 20 years, brands tend to hold back how much information they share because they worry about losing negotiating leverage with their media partners. That’s fine when there are four media partners and you have to maintain leverage. It doesn’t work when you’re buying 10,000 line items. You you have to be able to share information. And so I think what I what I what I’d look at first is like, okay, I want to sell X number of cases of beer during this World Cup timeframe. Like I know that in in in New York and in California, for example, there’s a huge investment that should be done targeting the Hispanic community around the World Cup. It’s a it’s a tent pole moment to build brand equity. I’d have a KPI around that. And then I would go to my retail media partners and I would say, here’s what I want to do. And what information can you share with me that will give you confidence that will give me confidence that I’m hitting those objectives. Now, look, some of that’s happening, right? Like I don’t mean to suggest these conversations aren’t happening. But I think, you know, if if I’m Anheuser-Busch looking at the World Cup, I would have started this conversation in June of this year and built something really compelling, knowing that it’s going to be something that I’m going to repeat, and not just for my next tent pole, but for also my ongoing programs. And then the retailers have to start thinking about what does it mean to share really detailed understanding around how their methodology for measurement aligns to the in-house methodology of measurement for the for the brand. When you get those two things to come together, you see huge results.
Greg Kihlstrom: And speaking of the the data piece of this, you know, got got to talk about AI here, of course. So, um, you know, the the promise of AI in retail media is, you know, is is substantial, but similar to the conversation about sharing data just to to get better results, AI takes good data to work um at its best. So, maybe start with the the challenges here, you know, what what are some of the biggest data challenges for brands and retailers before they can start getting more benefits from from AI-driven optimization?
Dave Simon: Yeah, well, so I think one of the challenges you have with the retail space is that typically the manufacturer is blind to the data about the sale itself.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah.
Dave Simon: Right? So if you sell in CVS, you sell in Kroger, you sell in a hold, you know, you don’t really know who’s buying what as a brand. And so I think that like that’s a challenge. On the other hand, most brands have no idea what’s happening to individual users on YouTube.
Greg Kihlstrom: Right.
Dave Simon: And yet people are hemorrhaging money, pumping money into YouTube because they see sales results on the other end of it or they see some KPI that equates to success.
Greg Kihlstrom: And so I think
Dave Simon: It’s funny to talk about AI, right? Like Mako, the company I was at prior to this is arguably one of the best companies in the world when it comes to predictive machine learning and and and developing, you know, deep neural networks to drive high quality predictions of likelihood of an ad generating an event. And I learned a tremendous amount while I was there. The way I’d put this is, I don’t know what AI in retail media means.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah.
Dave Simon: I think it’s it’s going to mean a dozen different things. And so what I’m looking for and what I’ve seen so far are individual use cases being solved. There was a brilliant one that I saw, I can’t remember the retailer uh who was doing it off the top of my head, but there was a there was an AI platform that’s being used to process all of the sales information so that retailers know how to restock and what to restock in their shelves.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah.
Dave Simon: Sign me up. Like that makes perfect sense. You have point of sale data that has SKU level, often times it’s married to loyalty card data, and you have product shop stocking data from your ERP. Those two things talking to each other with an AI system coordinating makes a ton of sense, right? Great example. Freeks Snowstorm show is is is forecasted. You get that data from Accuweather. All of a sudden Home Depot knows to automatically order more snow shovels.
Greg Kihlstrom: Right.
Dave Simon: Like that kind of thing can be expressed tremendously. Once you have that data infrastructure, and you have the information organized between point of sale and the SKU level data, and the loyalty card data, then you can automatically start applying that to AI in advertising. And specifically the part that I I’m focused on, uh and that we’re focused on here at Vibe is, how can we make sure that the number of impressions required to generate the sale of a product is as low as possible.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah.
Dave Simon: That is all about a prediction of the likelihood of an ad generating a sale. Now, in store, you don’t anchor it on a person because you serve an ad to many people. But you look at store level data and we can actually drive substantial lift. We’ve seen this. We’ve got over 40 case studies that show that when you put in-store audio on during a campaign, the results go up. And so we know that it has an impact. Once we know that it has an impact, you can fine tune a model and figure out what to do with it.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, and I mean, to your point about AI, I guess, you know, anyone anyone that’s been in programmatic advertising um has been using AI, you know, for, you know, in your case since 2008, right? So there it it it does require a a nuance. But I but I think the the point there is to to use it to do things like you’re talking about, which is to be able to predict other other types of inventory and and just kind of connect the dots, which which I do think the better the data, the the better the better the possibilities.
Dave Simon: let me give you let me give you my favorite use case real quick because this is a very real opportunity that um it it might be a little bit further away than right now, but but it’s something that can be done today if if the retailer makes the right investment.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah.
Dave Simon: There are a certain number of products that are on the shelves that sit there for longer than they should. The question becomes if you were to marry an ad message or an incentive digitally delivered in the store and you can turn over that inventory more effectively. Doesn’t that give you negotiating leverage on the stocking side as well as the merchant side? That like that opportunity, like forget about the individual brand objective. Just think about the grocer’s objective of turning over their shelves.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah.
Dave Simon: Right? You can use media and messaging in store to do that, to drive incremental volume of the sale. Well, all of a sudden, if you’re the one who’s able to turn up and turn down the sales volume for a particular brand, imagine what that does to change your relationship with the brand.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah.
Dave Simon: The AI system that connects point of sale to media execution, that’s where the real lift and sales volume can happen. And that’s a unique thing that e-commerce can’t really do the same way that that in store can, particularly in these categories that still see north of 80% of their product sold in stores.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And you you touched a bit on measurement already, but I wanted to wanted to talk a little bit more about that and, you know, a lot of retail media networks are measured on standard KPIs, ROAs, things like that. How should brands be thinking about a measurement framework to really capture the total value of their retail media network investment?
Dave Simon: Yeah, I mean, look, I think this is probably when we talk to brands and we talk to retailers, this is arguably the single biggest pain point and it’s very specific. If you buy from three different retail media networks, let’s just say you ask for the exact same the exact same data point, SKU level ROAs, right? The methodology for determining ROAs is different by each three of those.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah.
Dave Simon: And so if you’re the brand and you’re having a hard time navigate and by the way, none of those three line up to your own internal measurement scheme.
Greg Kihlstrom: Fair enough, yeah.
Dave Simon: So I think somebody has to take the leap of faith to unmask what’s going on. And I don’t think it’s a trade organization IAB driven thing. I don’t think it’s, you know, some sort of standard across retailers. I think it really starts with the brand standardizing their own thing. And so I from my perspective, the brand is the one that should say, okay, guys, here’s how I’m measuring you. Here’s exactly how it works. You know, tell me how you’re determining what SKU level ROAs is. Do you have a 14-day window for that individual product? Is it one day? Is it based on exposure? What’s your test and control methodology, right? And so I think either the brand doing it themselves or doing it through a partner like Pat Formance or IRI, bringing that methodology to the RMN and saying, this is how measurement’s going to work. And knowing you’re opening yourself up to the risk a little bit of people manipulating that, but that’s why you pick good partners that won’t do that and they get the bulk of your investment. And so I think once you do that, you’re incentivizing the retail media networks to peel back the layers and show you how their measurement methodology works.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah.
Dave Simon: You know, the the interesting thing is that there’s there’s been a big debate, right? Standards accelerate growth. The minute that Neilson online campaign ratings, digital video became a product, the level of investment in online video accelerated.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah.
Dave Simon: On the other hand, this is a bidded market, it’s a competitive market. So if I can generate an insight as a brand that determines why somebody buys me and not one of my competitors, I don’t want to share that. I want to share that with a couple of retail media partners who will build campaigns and build programs around that for me, but I don’t necessarily want to operate on a standard. I want to stay competitive. You know, so I think that’s one of the things that the analogy I always give is if you’re the hedge fund that pays for satellites to stare at the Foxconn trucks over the Apple plants in China, you’re not going to share that information with other hedge funds. That’s not standard information. Well, if I determine that like for whatever reason, a female targeted product skews really well for men, and I know that when no one else does, I’m going to go steal that market share before anyone else figures that out. So I think your retail partners are are ready and willing to invest with you there, but you have to sort of peel back the onion a little bit and show them what you’re doing.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. So, looking looking ahead a bit, what does a truly mature retail media network look like? You know, how has the relationship between CPGs, retailers, technology evolved from not only what we see today, but, you know, where where you see this headed over the next several years?
Dave Simon: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think let’s define let’s define maturity. You know, look, there are some really big retail media networks out there. Walmart’s huge. Kroger is becoming very, very large. Home Depot is becoming very, very big. So I don’t think scale is the right way to measure maturity. I think it’s can I turn up or down the dollar investment that I have while knowing that I’m turning up or down the sales volume I get. And I think the maturity is all of the products that are that a retailer has, whether it be part of trade, or retail media, or online, in store, whatever. Them understanding deeply how those things play together to drive results, that’s what really matters. And I think there are a handful that are getting their way there. But look, you know, this is the other thing I tell people on my team all the time. It took us 20 years to convert television into CTV programmatic. Retail media is only been around really for like three or four years at the maturity that it’s at now, right? It’s been around for longer, but like it’s not a real thing. It’s early. And so, I think we have to be patient while these very large organizations who by the way, let’s not forget, retail is under sort of a few existential threats, right? And I think they’re trying to navigate those while they’re trying to reinvent their their their retail media business. The other thing that I think that I see quite a bit is the people that generate the fastest growth, that accelerate the fastest. They typically are run a little bit like a benevolent dictatorship. And I use that term sort of talking a cheek a little bit, but you want one person whose job it is to look at all the ways that a brand can engage with you.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah.
Dave Simon: You don’t want to be in the middle of P&L fights. And the the the that’s a real shift for these retailers, right? But you’ll see some of the ones that have sold the private equity, they’re making really dramatic shifts in how their P&Ls are organized. And so I think if if I’m the CMO or the CEO, the the the sort of the head of trade or head of merchant, I’m going to be looking at like, how do I take my Pepsi relationship from 50 million to 150 million? What’s it going to take? And anchor on the customer and then sort of work backwards from there as I go internally. And I think we’re seeing a handful of retailers do that now. Others are just starting their journey and so they’re not there yet. But I think that’s the maturity curve that we’re going to go through is, you know, more of that benevolent dictatorship, more focus on the brand objective uh and and less focus on how P&Ls are transacting and everything else. And and that’s a political battle that has to be waged and will get sorted out and, you know, when it does, you’ll see a lot of growth.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, love it. Well, Dave, as we wrap up here, a couple of last questions for you. First one, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
Dave Simon: Well, if our if our RFP pipeline is any indication, you’re going to see a lot more screens in stores. You know, digital in-store signage is a huge, huge area of investment. We’re talking about significant CapEx investments from a lot of retail media networks who are eagerly pushing screens into store. And then I think the other thing you’re going to start to see more of is, you know, in the last six months, our platform has been we’ve been asked to integrate our platform into more core retail media platforms. And so I think the ability to use in store in conjunction with offsite and onsite is a really big priority for these retail media networks. So, I think those are the sort of the two things that I’m really excited about. And a year from now, I certainly hope to be talking about how big in store is, although that would that is a bit self-serving, but I do believe it. Like I I do fundamentally believe that it is sort of one of the last frontiers these guys can crack into and there’s a lot of enthusiasm, there’s a lot of excitement. We’ve seen well over 40 RFPs come in for proposals to build out in store signage. Uh and so I think that’s a big area of investment for for this year.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, nice. Well, thanks again for for all your um ideas and and insights here. Last question for you before we wrap up. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Dave Simon: That’s a great question. What do I do to stay agile? I do two things a lot. I talk to customers every day, both buyers and retail media networks, and I talk to my entire org top to bottom. That’s a luxury I have that that I couldn’t do with a 5,000 person team necessarily, but I think understanding what the market is saying at an intimate level is so, so important in these innovation curves. And so I think that’s that’s a big priority for me is making sure we’re staying close to the market and close to the people who are closest to the market every day.
