In the world of retail media, mergers don’t come more super-sized than Omnicom’s $13 billion acquisition of IPG, which will create the world’s largest advertising holding company. But this week TWIRM is asking: In retail media, is bigger always better?
TWIRM, as every retail media maven knows, is the This Week in Retail Media podcast, hosted by Kate Dickson, Head of Marketing and Communications, Retail Media, STRATACACHE, and Jonathan Rosen, STRATACACHE’s Global EVP of Retail Media Strategy. Each week, Kate and Jonathan chat across the Atlantic about three retail media stories that excite them, intrigue them and even, sometimes, make them unspool the proverbial “tape measure.”
The top story this week, courtesy of Adweek, is the massive $13 billion consolidation of Madison Avenue giants Omnicom and IPG, which positions the new entity as the dominant force in retail media—and a powerful “one-stop shop” offering integrated, full-stack solutions for data-driven ad targeting and media campaign planning. But Kate and Jonathan aren’t convinced being the biggest means it will be the best.
“These ‘one-stop shops’ can be dangerous because they’re unwieldy and they bundle things in ways that maybe aren’t what clients really want,” Jonathan notes, while Kate points out that the merger’s resulting layoffs may allow the deep pool of freelance retail media talent to create specialized shops for companies that don’t want to work with so big an entity.
Kate and Jonathan then discuss new research showing that challenger brands are dramatically outperforming legacy CPG companies on Amazon. Lastly, they check out U.K. supermarket Morrison’s launch of in-store screens.
Click here to hear Jonathan and Kate unpack the blockbuster Omnicom-IPG merger and its potential impact on in-store retail media.
