It’s TWIRM time again. Listen closely—did you hear that? Meta just made a quiet move that is reverberating loudly across the retail media world.
TWIRM, of course, is the This Week in Retail Media podcast, where Kate Dickson, Head of Marketing and Communications, Retail Media, STRATACACHE, and Jonathan Rosen, PRN’s Global EVP of Retail Media Strategy, chat candidly across the Atlantic about three retail media news stories that excite them, intrigue them and even, sometimes, give them “feels.”
Kate and Jonathan kick off this week’s conversation discussing Meta’s new policy, barely a blip until Ad Age cast a spotlight on it, to make public its data on what retail media networks pay for advertising on its platforms like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
It’s all in the name of transparency, right? Let the sunshine in. Or is it a savvy move to win advertising dollars by revealing other retail media networks’ markups?
Maybe both, says Kate. “This move potentially is self-serving because they’re going to want to attract advertisers to go directly to them without necessarily going through a retail media network,” she notes. “But it does highlight a real genuine concern (about opaque pricing) across the industry as a whole.”
Now other retail media networks will have to decide if they follow Meta’s lead in lifting the pricing veil—and that’s positive, according to Jonathan. “Anything that moves us closer to understanding really what’s under the hood in the ad tech world is going to be good,” he says.
After unpacking Meta’s big move, Kate and Jonathan soar to the cloud with Dollar General and walk down the “endless aisle” of David’s Bridal’s bid to become a luxury lifestyle brand.
Click here to tune into the latest TWIRM with Kate and Jonathan.
