Executive Summary

First-party data is the backbone of retail media business, but by integrating existing data with location data, retailers can build more accurate shopper profiles to achieve greater success with their targeted advertising strategies.

Market Scale and Opportunity

• The retail media market is taking off strongly in the US, with year-over-year growth of 19.8% set to see the market total $51.9 billion in 2023, Coresight Research estimates.
• Amazon is a leader in the US retail media market, holding a 65% share in 2022, we estimate. The company has reported growing revenues from its advertising services business in the past couple of years. However, conventional retailers and new entrants can leverage their physical stores to reach niche shopper segments close to the point of purchase and gain share of the retail media opportunity in
  the coming years.
• The brick-and-mortar channel remains relevant in today’s retail landscape. Major retailers including Costco, Target and Walmart saw substantially higher in-store visits versus unique website visitors in February 2023. Companies must therefore take both the online and offline channels into account in developing their retail media strategies.
• Location analytics is key to solving the localization puzzle, enabling retailers to understand shopper behavior in specific trade areas—and these insights can inform marketing and product strategies.
• Retailers can leverage third-party data such as household income data to move at the pace of shoppers while ensuring highly targeted and localized ad campaigns.

What We Think

Retail media is a growing opportunity. In establishing retail media capabilities, retailers must focus on actionable first-party data, understand their target audience and ensure transparency with their brand partners to foster long-term partnerships. However, to take retail media to the next level—highly targeted, timely and personalized—retailers must bolster their first-party data with third-party data such as location analytics, which can be the starting point for creating comprehensive shopper profiles.