The past, current and future state of Retail Media Networks are in the spotlight in this dynamic, live interview from the ReThink Retail podcasting studio on the NRF Big Show show floor in New York City with Aran Hamilton, Co-Founder & CEO of Toronto's Vantage. Aran is a pioneer in the retail media space and offers valuable lessons and powerful insights for retailers and brands of all sizes regarding the scope and future of this much-talked-about revolution.
The past, current and future state of Retail Media Networks are in the spotlight in this dynamic, live interview from the ReThink Retail podcasting studio on the NRF Big Show show floor in New York City with Aran Hamilton, Co-Founder & CEO of Toronto's Vantage. Aran is a pioneer in the retail media space and offers valuable lessons and powerful insights for retailers and brands of all sizes regarding the scope and future of this much-talked-about revolution.
About Aran
Aran Hamilton is the CEO and Co-Founder of Vantage, the only complete enterprise retail media platform. Every day Vantage helps market leading retailers and brands around the world turn data into insight and action.
He is an alumnus of such pioneering firms as Monitor, PSTG, MIST, Digital Cement, m-Qube, VeriSign, and EnStream/Zoompass. He is the past Chair of the Mobile Transactions & Commerce Summit, and the Co-Chair of EXCITE! (formerly known as IdentityNORTH).
Aran speaks at conferences in North America and around the word about his hands-on experience rolling out platforms for retail media, emerging commerce, privacy, and digital ID and authentication.
Michael LeBlanc 00:04
Welcome to The Voice of Retail podcast. My name is Michael LeBlanc, and I am your host. This podcast is produced in conjunction with Retail Council of Canada.
The past, current and future state of retail media networks are in the spotlight in this dynamic, live interview from the ReThink Retail podcasting studio on the NRF Big Show show-floor in New York City with Aran Hamilton, Co-Founder & CEO of Toronto's Vantage.
Aran is a pioneer in the retail media space and offers valuable lessons and powerful insights for retailers and brands of all sizes regarding the scope and future of this much-talked-about revolution.
Let's listen in now.
Michael LeBlanc 00:39
All right, welcome, everyone to another episode, fantastic episode, of The ReThink Retail podcast. And as well, it's gonna be copied over onto The Voice of Retail. I'm here with one of my favorite people in the Big Apple, in New York City, Aran Hamilton. How are you doing?
Aran Hamilton 00:52
Thanks for having me here. And this is great to be with you here at the NRF. This is awesome.
Michael LeBlanc 00:56
Well, you and I live in the same city but curiously, we usually find each other in other cities when we actually get together in the same place.
Aran Hamilton 01:03
Okay, but it was much warmer in Vegas.
Michael LeBlanc 01:06
Yes.
Aran Hamilton 01:07
I expected it to be a couple degrees warmer when it came down to the states into-, into New York, but that's okay. There's so much excitement that this place is just hopping.
Michael LeBlanc 01:16
The massiveness, the capacious massiveness, as you would say, of the NRF show warms my heart.
Aran Hamilton 01:22
I wouldn't say that, but that-, since you said, that's cool. It is. There's a lot going on.
Aran Hamilton 01:26
There's a lot of people here, the buzz is phenomenal. It's great to see the show really doing well after-, after COVID and people are really excited by a lot of things that are going on here.
Michael LeBlanc 01:26
Yeah.
Michael LeBlanc 01:36
All right, well, listen, we kind of jumped right in that. Tell the folks a little bit about yourself, your background, who you are and what you do for a living.
Aran Hamilton 01:43
My name is Aran Hamilton. I'm the CEO and actually one of the co-founders at Vantage we're doing, I'm told, some pretty cool stuff with arguably what is the hottest area in retail innovation today, retail media networks and we've been out here at NRF talking about what we're doing and really excited to, to bring it to market.
Aran Hamilton 02:04
What's your background, like, were you always a technologist, were you a business strategist, how did you-, how do you-, how did you get into what you're doing today?
Michael LeBlanc 02:11
So, my background is in payments, digital payments, I helped in Canada, a lot of the launching of digital payments and that's how I got, I think, how we first met, and through me writing some stuff for the Retail Council of Canada, for the magazine. I helped with a lot of the innovation that's been taking place in digital payments in Canada, kind of my, my last career about 10, 15 years ago, and really have helped kind of bridge that gap between data and analytics and payments and where it's going and I felt that that all started leading towards, you know, a lot of innovation that was going to be needed in retail in the in the coming years.
Michael LeBlanc 02:52
And we're, also we should say fellow alumni of Rotmans, so we have a lot of a lot of connection points, actually, you and I.
Aran Hamilton 02:58
You know, Toronto's a small-, it's a big town, 5 million people or so, but it's a small town in the sense that, you know, a lot of people know each other and, and you and I bump into each other, you know, very, not often enough, not often enough.
Michael LeBlanc 03:11
Well, let's talk about Vantage, you, you, me-, and in my mind you guys were a retail media network before everybody started talking about retail media networks, but that's not much of an explanation about what Vantage is. So how do we-, how do we understand Vantage, and what-, you know, listen, I see a lot of signs for retail media networks that companies like providers or people who are empowering retail media networks, so why don't we tell you-, tell everybody about Vantage?
Aran Hamilton 03:36
Yeah, so we-, we-, actually we took the arrows by being you know, very early.
Michael LeBlanc 03:41
First out of the gate.
Aran Hamilton 03:41
First out of the gate. Yeah, so we-, we've been doing retail media for almost 10 years now.
Michael LeBlanc 03:46
10 years.
Aran Hamilton 03:47
And it wasn't called retail media, we called it co-op marketing. We call that a number of other things beforehand, but you know, the-, the industry is coalesced around retail media networks. We-, we are the enterprise retail media platform and our plan, you know, what's different about us is that we actually work with these leading retailers to help them roll out or scale their retail media programs.
Aran Hamilton 04:08
So, our platform is really modular, it's flexible. And it can be implemented in a whole bunch of different ways, but at its core, it has three components and it's-, it's really about, we have this kind of retail analytics portal. So, retailers need to be able to share their data with their vendor partners, and they have to do that in a way that's robust, secure, scalable, privacy respectful.
Michael LeBlanc 04:32
And we're talking there about how many people see the media or ad that you have purchased.
Aran Hamilton 04:37
No, no, we're talking about like-, the basic retail, so retail analytics is, and the relationship between the retailers and the vendors is shifting a lot right now and the vendors saying listen, we can be better partners. If you give us better information about how things are going in store, what's selling, how quickly is it moving, you know, who's looking at it, and you know, what kind of other supporting information can we get.
Aran Hamilton 05:00
And so the retailers, a lot of retailers have historically been very apprehensive to share that information out, because they thought you know it, rightfully so it could get into competitors hands and so we need to the-, but they needed to find a way to, you know, not just give it away, but to do that in a way that was economically smart but it had to be, you know, very secure, very privacy respectful and, and so Vantage enables that.
Michael LeBlanc 05:27
Right.
Aran Hamilton 05:27
And that's a core element of what we help the retailers do.
Michael LeBlanc 05:31
And when you say better partners, that's kind of code for we can give you more of our marketing dollars to sell our product.
Aran Hamilton 05:37
No, it's not. It's also about, like, what kind of things do we need to know about the industry, what are people looking at, how do we better shape our products.
Michael LeBlanc 05:45
Okay.
Aran Hamilton 05:45
what color should it be, you know, what size should it be, how many different offerings should we have, you know, a high value, a low value, medium value, and a low value kind of product, or, you know, do we only need two versions of the product and so, there's a lot of insights that the retailers need to be able to share and dialogue with the vendors about, and they need the richness of data to do that.
Aran Hamilton 06:05
So, it's, this is not about analytics of retail media, this is about the whole business that they're offering and, and, you know, increasingly, the vendor relationship with retailers is not just about kind of okay, we're gonna ship your product, you're gonna sell it for whatever you can and send us back whatever you can't sell. There's a much more dynamic, a rich relationship about product development, road mapping and, you know, what product and what scale-
Michael LeBlanc 06:30
Understanding the consumer journey that-, what got them to that aisle, what got them there, where did that start.
Aran Hamilton 06:35
Yeah, absolutely and so that real time analytics portal is, you know, some retailers have been giving, you know, kind of data, three months in arrears and they just do a data bump, and then-, then the vendor has to hire someone to analyze it and give them insights. So, they're working in months and months in arrears, you know, giving you all to give that information in real time, you know, what's flying off the shelves, what's not-, what's-, what's lagging, all that kind of information is important to be able to share with the vendors real time.
Aran Hamilton 07:03
And so, we help with that and one of the core things, though, is when you can show the vendor this is what's happening, either on site, you know, for e-commerce or what's happening in store to, for the vendor to be able to impact it, or influences. Okay, so okay, this is what's happening, how do I change it,
Michael LeBlanc 07:19
I see.
Aran Hamilton 07:19
and so one of the core elements of changing is, is to be able to run advertising and that could be on site for the, you know, on the on the on the e commerce website, or in the application, or, you know, a host of other venues, or it could be off site through, you know, social media channels, or through, you know, advertising on the rest of the internet could be directly at home, it could be you know.
Michael LeBlanc 07:39
And now-, now that's where-, I'm gonna get ahead of myself a little bit, but I love the thread of the conversation. That's where I started to get a bit fuzzy between you started like co-op-, traditional coop dollars that get me x and y. Correct me if I'm wrong, and I don't put words in your mouth. Basically, retail media in the way we understand it today is saying, well, you could put your dollars into the platforms, or you could put your dollars into you being the brands, or you could put your dollars into your retail partners, but it's a different bucket of money, essentially, because there's co-op dollars that say-
Aran Hamilton 07:39
I think a lot of those, those buckets are blending, and I think that there's a massive shift that's underway for the next couple of years, especially where traditional TV money is going to go into, you know, kind of connected TV and, and new forms of-, of lot of things that will be going through retail media. So the benefit of a running advertising, if you're a brand or a vendor, and you want to rather than going out on your own, and just running ads on Google or Facebook or Pinterest, etc., right is that you have no idea what the impact is, you can know if they drive people to the store, but you have no idea if it actually caused the checkout or not.
Aran Hamilton 08:50
And so, if you're working with first party data that the retailers have, then you can actually look at attribution, and you can look at the success rate. And it's important to know if, you know, if you're running, you know, this image or this image, or that call to action, or that offer, which one is generating, you know, actual conversions. And so the retailers can help close the loop of that and help you educate not just for the sales with that vendor with that retailer, but across all of your retail work.
Michael LeBlanc 09:17
So I can see that in my head pretty clearly with e-commerce, I can connect the dots all the way through a checkout, I can see that that's the-, so to speak, the easy part, but how do they, you know, yeah, the easier said than done part, but how do you connect that then to store transactions because we know there's such an integration between influenced online bought in store and, and vice versa, how do you guys think about that?
Aran Hamilton 09:39
So, it's, it's, you know, let's be honest, depending on where you are in the world, you know, in the UK, Europe, it could be in store retailers, so it's still going to at least 80% of sales depending on the on-, the on the category, in the US, it's North America. It's a lot higher than that still. It's shifting and of course, it's shifted massively during COVID, but it's coming back, people want to get back in stores, they want to get back to the high streets, and they want to get back to touching and feeling and stop buying three pairs of shoes to return two of them like that-, you know, people don't like doing that and the retailers don't like them doing.
Michael LeBlanc 10:11
Right.
Aran Hamilton 10:11
So, that's shifting. People are-, so it's really important to be able to connect those things, without being privacy, you know, creepy, you have to make sure that you're giving people the ability to, you know, some people still shop with cash and so, it is tricky. There's a lot of cool media math you can do and modeling you can do, there's some cool technology stuff you can do there, for all of-, the fact that we say that we you know, as consumers, I and like everyone else, we want to have more privacy, we do carry around these devices with us, 24/7, that are leaking information about us and in some ways that can be you know, used to, to kind of close the loops without being you know, privacy creepy because you look at it in aggregate you don't look at it. We're not looking to see what Michael E. LeBlanc is doing at a particular store. We're looking to see what people that are good looking, young, husky men are doing, you know, as they shop.
Michael LeBlanc 11:14
Husky, good word. Husky.
Aran Hamilton 11:16
Those are the-, the point is to look at it in a way that is privacy respectful, and it still gets you the guidance that you need and the insights you need. Without, no one really cares to be honest, what Michael E. LeBlanc is doing as he's shopping, what we care about is people like him, and how are they responding to advertising or offers or-, or-, or components to a product.
Michael LeBlanc 11:40
What else do we need to know about your solution, because you talked about analytics, but I think it's-, I know it's more than that, because you're kind of powering for retailers. I don't know if you can say which retailers but you're powering their retail media, talk more about like, is it a dashboard, is it-, it's connected to the vendors in some way.
Aran Hamilton 11:59
So, it's pretty cool. So, what-, we started doing the analytics, and that was our core, and then people said, listen, we need to be able to influence it and we need to have impact on it. So we need to be an action company and so we did, we rolled out this digital retail media platform and it was really just one clean UI where vendors and retailers could, could use to build campaigns and that could be the retailer billing campaigns on a managed service basis, we actually have a pretty cool self-service UI that allows the vendors themselves on behalf to go and access the retailer's data, and to be able to run ads to drive to their own conversions, but actually, I don't think either, I mean, I think those two things are now table stakes and what you need to be able to do is much more.
Aran Hamilton 12:46
And so, what I'm really excited about is that we saw the need and where I think, you know, the industry is going is this third component that we have at Vantage, which is I think the most important, we have these retailer brand workflow modules. If you think about within their retailer, there are probably eight to a dozen different teams that have to come together to run media. There's the media sales team, the media planning team, the audience strategy team, the creative design team, the execution team, the ad ops team, there is someone who has to look at compliance, there's someone that has to look at measurement and reporting and there's someone that has to make sure that the finance the billing, the reconciliation actually takes place.
Michael LeBlanc 13:29
Yeah.
Aran Hamilton 13:30
And so, what I'm seeing when I walk around here at NRF, and as I talk to folks, is that Vantage is different in the sense that we're not trying to, you know, handle just one of these components. We're not just trying to run ads, to be honest, as you say, as you kind of alluded to running ads is the easy part of this, what's really difficult for a retailer is to either launch or scale a retail media platform, or they call their programs, looking at these eight different-, eight to 12 different teams, and making sure that they can all work.
Michael LeBlanc 14:05
Right.
Aran Hamilton 14:05
And so if you're a Criteo great company, you know, huge reach if you're Citrus ad, you know, great capabilities, technology, but very niche. They do one component of what the retailer has to stand up and we love partnering with these guys, but what's what we have to help the retailer with is-, is actually executing and launching the whole thing, or if you already launched a retail media program, how do you scale it to the size that it needs to be.
Michael LeBlanc 14:36
Let's talk about scale for a bit because in my mind, you know, most obviously, as you and I would walk various trade shows around America and in the US. We're talking, you know, it's Amazon, Walmart, the big hitters, the Kroger's of the world and, and you've talked about scale. So, I have two questions about scale. One is, you know, for retail media, it feels like the purview of just the biggest folks today, but is there an opportunity for that to go down to mid-size?
Aran Hamilton 15:02
Yeah, it's coming down and 2024, 2025 are going to be big, big years for this.
Michael LeBlanc 15:07
But most-, most of those retailers and you've made this point to me, I said, listen, the top 20 vendors are spending a lot of money within their big partnerships, big, sophisticated vendors, but then there's tons, literally thousands of vendors who are smaller, enthusiastic, but don't have the means to kind of play.
Aran Hamilton 15:27
Absolutely and so if you look, say, in Canada, there are two retailers that have self-serve capabilities, Amazon and Home Depot. We happen to Power Home Depot's and so, you know, I think that's something that we're really proud of and I know Home Depot is really proud of is the giving the vendors the ability to do hands on keyboard and getting in and do their own analytics and-
Michael LeBlanc 15:47
Any size like-
Aran Hamilton 15:48
Any size, any size, any size. So, so they have different tiers of what you can do, like sip different audiences that you can attach your advertising to, depending on kind of how big you are and how much you're spending or, or how much, you know-, you know, how-, the size of your commitment with, with-, with Home Depot.
Michael LeBlanc 16:05
Or how much you want to grow your business with Home Depot, right?
Aran Hamilton 16:07
And that's the other side of it, right, is the strategy. So, if you look at the top 10, 20 retailers out there, they have started to make investments, and then say, the top 10 retailers out there, a number of them have built their own solutions or cobbled together something because they could throw bodies at this, they could throw dollars at cobbling together, you know, different pieces of technology.
Michael LeBlanc 16:27
Retailers have been getting money from vendors since there were retailers and vendors.
Michael LeBlanc 16:30
Last question for you and this I think is tapping more into the experience you have, in the many, many conversations you have with many retailers about how they think about internally, and you mentioned it before, coop dollars become retail media dollars, it kind of muddies the water because, you know, really the merchant would own the coop dollars and you know, there's a media somebody or rather that takes other over and above money and at least you said at the beginning, these worlds are kind of coming together or will come together, but they kind of get a bit muddy, you know, I imagine when you're talking about-
Aran Hamilton 16:30
So they had to take advantage and they had to figure out how to do it, but the problem is scaling that and so we're super proud that-, that Home Depot in the States and Canada have chosen us to scale their retail media, retail media plus, which is a phenomenal program growing by leaps and bounds and their-, we just-, we've been-, they've been using us as a managed service solution for-, for about a year now and now they're rolling out the self-serve capability through Vantage as well. To give all of their vendors all-, no matter what size they are the ability to to book and run advertising for offsite media.
Aran Hamilton 17:39
I think the reason they're coming together, and I think the reason that they're muddying to use that word, I'm not sure if that's the right word, but the reason it's being rethought is because it's not about taking dollars from the vendors anymore. I think that was how it started, but I think very much the leading retailers are thinking about how do we better partner with our vendors, how do we better execute and come up with strategic ways of being different and innovative together, and the retail media solution has to be able to, to handle those and allow them to execute and so I think this is really-, so and I don't think therefore the dollars need to sit in certain individual buckets anymore. I think this is a strategic opportunity for cool vendors to work with cool retailers to do cool things and-
Michael LeBlanc 18:25
I do wonder though, you know, when I was you know, I've been a merchant and your vendor is committed to $1 to spend $1 with you well, if you're traditional media spend was maybe I'll spend that dollar with Facebook, okay Facebook, I'm going to spend 50 cents now, I'm not going to spend $1 and it feels like there's some other relationship that can get in the way is like, hey, you committed to $1, like there's a higher order relationship that can-
Aran Hamilton 18:48
See that's not what I'm seeing what I'm seeing, in our-, in our experience is very much when you're doing it well the vendors are saying how many more dollars can I throw at this and have it maintain this kind of an impact and you know, where will the diminishing returns hit, what's the maximum I can do because if you look at where they might be spending money elsewhere, like TV, or sometimes direct at home, some of these things where they don't get this kind of they can't close the loop on attribution, they don't know what it's impacting, it's harder to justify putting money into a Superbowl ad or putting money into, you know, traditional other pieces of media, when they don't know what the impact is.
Aran Hamilton 19:28
And so this they can justify and I think what we what we definitely see is near the end of the year, when the vendors are saying listen, I'm-, I-, for whatever reason I'm sitting on a couple of million bucks or a couple 100,000 or even like a few $1,000 If you're a smaller vendor, what's the best bang I can get for this and they turn to the retailer and traditionally the retailer might have said listen, if it's less than $50,000 I can't justify,
Michael LeBlanc 19:51
I can't do anything with it.
Aran Hamilton 19:52
I can't put the time and energy into it, but you can go on hands on the keyboard, and you can execute, and you can be live and running within a day and that's pretty cool. And so-
Michael LeBlanc 20:02
And that flexibility because sometimes, you know, you might, as the season closes, how's it going, I'll, you know, I'll keep my powder dry, so to speak. And but, then at some point you run out of opportunity because as you say, listen, you can't spend the money and then you're in kind of a worse place kind of thing.
Aran Hamilton 20:18
Yeah, that sucks. And I feel bad for the retailers that that can execute, but you know, we don't run into that with our clients because realistically, what's happening is people are pulling money from other places, because they're seeing the bang for the buck that they can get with-, with our clients and they're super excited to close out the year that way and so-, so keep in mind, retail media started as just digital advertising within a retailer control, kind of onsite media, on the website, or mobile apps, and maybe the email program and then it evolved into, you know, kind of offsite meaning advertising on social media or other parts of the internet.
Aran Hamilton 20:52
But the retailers have looked around and said, well, wait a second, we are also doing in store digital media and so that has to get folded in.
Michael LeBlanc 20:58
Right.
Aran Hamilton 20:58
And that's a huge and growing market, because of course, you know, 80 to 90% of sales are still happening in-store. So, you gotta be, you want to be able to execute and do really cool, I'm using that word a lot, but really, you know, innovative and real time, like, you don't have to plan this in advance. You don't have to plan this a quarter in advance, you can plan this a week in advance, and execute and be running things into the in-store networks, and so, and also, but then how do you differentiate between an end cap that's digital and an end cap that's not digital. So, you got to fold that in together.
Aran Hamilton 21:27
So now really, retail media encompasses all of the advertising that a retailer can control whenever and wherever customers are coming into contact with the brand.
Michael LeBlanc 21:36
Well, it's exciting days, and I always get-, I always learn so much when I talk to you and I get very excited about-, about your business and about the business. So, it's great to catch up with you here and-
Aran Hamilton 21:46
There's so much going on and retail media, it is definitely-, 2024, 2025 are going to be really big for the, you know, for the-, for the retailers, especially like you know, obviously the larger retailers can move faster in 2024, and what we're finding is that as we talk to the smaller retailers going down to eat like even a billion dollars in sales, they can now-, we're starting to be able to show them a plan for how do you bring all those eight to 12 teams, and how do you execute all of that so you don't have to think that through and so making it really easy for these retailers to launch retail media networks, so they don't have reason to stay.
Aran Hamilton 22:23
The danger of course let's be honest Michael is that they if they keep their powder dry, they stay on the sidelines too long then those vendor dollars are going to get committed to other retailers and to other channels and-, and so they need to start getting out there and getting their share of those vendor dollars before they get all committed to amazon before they get committed to-, even the large retailers right and so it's really important that we start figuring out how to bring retail media to-, to the retailers that are not the largest in the-, in the ecosystem.
Michael LeBlanc 22:54
How do people get in touch with you and where do they go to learn more?
Aran Hamilton 22:56
Yeah, they can get us at got Vantage, gotvantage, gotvantage.com The website is going through a whole rethink right now and they can just get me I'm Aran, aran@gotvantage.com.
Michael LeBlanc 23:09
And LinkedIn, you're an-, you're an act-, you're an active LinkedIn.
Aran Hamilton 23:13
I am all over LinkedIn, not as-, not as active as you are, and some of our friends but man, I got to step up my game. You-, you embarrass me sometimes but-, but-, but I-, I-, yeah, I'm all over there and they can get us-, get us very easily there.
Michael LeBlanc 23:29
Well, thanks for joining me here and thanks to folks at ReThink, we're in the ReThink Retail podcast studio live on the show floor at NRF.
Aran Hamilton 23:36
This is awesome for everything to put this on and make this available for us. I really appreciate that. Huge shout out to them. Great to connect with you. I feel bad that we only see each other, well maybe we'll see each other on the plane going back as well.
Michael LeBlanc 23:47
That's true. Well listen, safe travels. Thanks for sitting down with me. It's a busy show and I wish you continued success and safe travels home.
Aran Hamilton 23:55
Thanks so much. Great to see you.
Michael LeBlanc 23:57
Thanks for tuning into this episode of The Voice of Retail. If you haven't already, follow on your favorite podcast platform so new episodes will end automatically each week and be sure to check out my other retail industry media properties, the Remarkable Retail podcast with Steve Dennis, and the Global eCommerce Leaders podcast.
I'm your host Michael LeBlanc, senior retail advisor, keynote speaker and ReThink Retail: 2023 Global Top Retail Influence. If you want more information, content or to chat, follow me on LinkedIn.
Safe travels everyone!
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
retail, retailers, vendors, media, vantage, NRF, store, advertising, dollars, Home Depot, ad, money, size, privacy, Rethink, podcast, Aran, execute, place, coop