Zigging Toward Retail Media? It’s Time For Brands To Zag

By Jeremy Gold, Head of Industry, CPG & Retail at Viant

While consumer packaged goods (CPG) advertisers zig towards committing programmatic brand dollars to retail media networks and commerce data sets, allow me to zag.

Increasingly, we are seeing major retailers, and many of the Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs) syndicating their data, evangelize the idea that targeting category shoppers should be the cornerstone of brand investment. I’d like to present an alternative view.

Before I do that, let me be clear in saying that first party retail purchase data is the gold standard for product marketing segmentation and targeting. There is simply no better way to drive sales and steal share by moving consumers from a competitive brand to your brand.

That’s the reason that historically CPGs have always dedicated, on average, 50% of their advertising expenditures to support their retail partners through shopper marketing initiatives and JBPs. The name of the game with this investment is demand capture.

Search, social, and retail media excel at demand capture, or intercepting consumers who already know what they want. But most brands overspend there, paying to reach audiences who often would’ve converted anyway. 

The real growth opportunity, by contrast, lies in demand generation — investing in channels like CTV and streaming audio that build awareness, create intent, and drive incremental lift. Tim and Chris Vanderhook have pushed the industry to recognize that real growth lives on the demand generation side of the ledger, not in oversaturating the consumers who are already planning to buy. The strongest marketers are rebalancing their mix accordingly, shifting spend toward creating demand, not just capturing it.

Brand Awareness Has a Different Job

The problem arises when these same retail data sets are used for brand-building initiatives, where the goals are fundamentally different. Brand advertising isn’t about capturing demand…it’s about creating it.

The purpose of brand marketing is to introduce new consumers to your product, build emotional connection, and inspire trial. When the category grows, everyone benefits — but the brand that drives that growth wins most.

So if the goal is to grow awareness and consideration, why are advertisers using their CTV brand dollars to target retail shoppers who are already in the category? I recognize that today’s economic pressures make “growing the pie” feel like a luxury, and that retail channel dynamics often require brands to invest in retailer-owned data. But direct brand investment is one of the few levers a marketer still fully controls. Handing that over to satisfy short-term objectives or avoid channel conflict can ultimately weaken the strategic value advertising is meant to deliver.

The Next Frontier: Emotionally Intelligent CTV

We’re on the cusp of a new era in Connected TV (CTV) advertising: one that empowers brands to meet consumers in the moments that matter most. Solutions like IRIS.TV enable advertisers to align ad delivery to the emotional tone and tenor that best aligns with the brand’s ethos. IRIS.TV ingests video content and assigns it a unique IRIS_ID— from there, IRIS uses artificial Intelligence to analyze the content, tagging it with data points such as its genre, emotional tone, and brand safety information. Advertisers can utilize this granular data to determine if the content is the right fit for their campaign, allowing them to target specific moments, optimize ad spend and avoid unsuitable placements. 

Study after study suggest that aligning to the user’s emotional state drives optimal brand outcomes; according to Upwave Portfolio Analytics, campaigns using segments from IRIS.TV’s content data marketplace saw a 2x lift in awareness, a 3x lift in ad recall and a 5x lift in favorability overall compared to normal CTV tactics.

One specific use case comes from PMG, who partnered with IRIS.TV to boost store visits and sales for their client Carl’s Jr, a national fast food chain. By leveraging IRIS-enabled™ contextual targeting, the campaign outperformed over 90% of QSR campaigns across multiple KPIs, demonstrating IRIS-enabled contextual targeting ability to do more than drive top-of-brand-funnel awareness and drive deeper consideration, brand preference and purchase intent. 

You’ve likely spent millions of dollars developing the creative message that best aligns with your brand. Let that creativity find its audience by employing technologies that can best find users who will be most receptive to that message. 

From Show-Based to “Use-Case” Targeting

If that sounds exciting, the possibilities only get better from here. In the not-too-distant future, brands will be able to eschew directly bought show and episode targeting and replace it with “use case” targeting.

You sell paper towels? Great! Let’s target messes and spills. Can you get closer to the center of the bullseye than that?  It may sound fanciful, but it isn’t. While nascent today, major CTV pubs are starting to pass time stamps in the programmatic bid stream which will, in turn, allow companies with content integrations (like IRIS) to segment each episode by product use case. The brands that adopt early will gain a strategic edge.

The future is exciting and those historic 50/50 splits between shopper marketing and brand marketing can each be made to drive optimal value so long as we understand which data sets are best suited to accomplish what those budgets are designed to achieve.

This blog was originally posted in TVREV’s Thought Leader Circle. Read the piece here: https://www.tvrev.com/news/zigging-toward-retail-media-its-time-for-brands-to-zag

Jeremy Gold is a seasoned digital advertising leader with over 20 years of experience across the CPG and retail industries. As Head of Industry, CPG and Retail at Viant, he specializes in building deep, strategic partnerships with CPG and commerce brands while bringing the most advanced AI solutions to the world’s leading advertisers. Previously, Jeremy played a pivotal role at Yahoo, where he helped launch the Yahoo DSP, built the CPG practice, and authored its Commerce Media strategy. He began his career at Advertising.com (acquired by AOL), holds an MBA from the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business, and has served as professional faculty at DePaul University’s Kellstadt School of Business.