Step Into the Future of Retail Media: Key Tenets to Scaling a Creative Workflow

Want to build your own retail media empire? Or at least figure out a way to manage your advertisers seamlessly to keep your stress low and your ability to scale high?

Retail media is growing fast. To make the most of that momentum, your advertisers have specific, evolving expectations about what working with you will be like (and what they’ll get out of their investment). Meanwhile, you’re under immense pressure to keep your content compliant, high quality, and strategic — and coax your advertisers away from your competition.

Fortunately, there’s a win-win solution on the table. Automating and scaling your creative workflows thoughtfully can enhance operational efficiency for you and offer impactful, satisfying advertising experiences for your advertisers.

What’s So Challenging About Managing Advertisers and Retail Media Creative Workflows?

Navigating the complexities of managing advertisers and retail media creative workflows includes challenges such as:

• Legal and compliance: Making sure your content aligns with diverse market regulations.
• Design management: Balancing advertiser-specific customization with consistent quality standards.
• Change management: Adapting to new technologies and processes with team training and alignment.
• Technology integration: Seamlessly integrating varied tools and solutions in your cohesive, easy-to-navigate content ecosystem.

To put this differently, there’s a lot going on. And, if you’re interested in scaling your retail media network, you need to put extra effort into making your processes sleek and seamless.

Seems impossible? It doesn’t have to be. With thoughtful implementation of automation and strategic workflow upgrades, you can scale and leave your advertisers satisfied at the same time.

Implement These Tenets to Scale Your Workflows Effectively

Get ready, get set, scale! Consider integrating these strategies into your processes:

Prioritize compliance before anything else.

Embedding compliance checks — preferably automated checks — into your creative processes provides safeguards against legal pitfalls and maintains brand consistency across platforms. This will also help you swiftly adapt to new regulations or onboard new advertisers, which supports efficient scaling processes.

Use automation to boost operational efficiency.

Don’t just automate compliance checks; automate your ad approvals, content scheduling, performance tracking, and other business processes as it makes sense for your team. This will help you meet higher efficiency standards and free up your creative teams to focus on innovation rather than mundane tasks.

Build effective self-service portals.

Self-service portals empower advertisers to manage their campaigns autonomously, from ad creation to analytics. An intuitive, user-friendly portal that offers template customization, real-time analytics, and seamless billing processes can dramatically enhance advertiser satisfaction and, ultimately, advertiser loyalty.

Use audience segmentation thoughtfully.

Activate your customer data and use it to categorize your audience. By segmenting your customers based on demographics, purchasing behavior or other relevant criteria, you can offer precision targeting to your advertisers.

This will boost the efficacy of their ad campaigns and also help out end buyers by giving them more relevant content. In other words, this will be a good user experience for both your advertisers and your shared customers.

Sell your owned-and-operated inventory.

Selling your own inventory allows you to provide advertisers with prime real estate for their ads. It also gives you better control over the ad environment, which means you can guarantee a great user experience and ensure the advertised content aligns with both your brand values and audience preferences.

Extend your reach to 'walled gardens.'

You don’t have to pick one or the other — nor should you. Platforms such as Meta and Google offer your advertisers a vast, diverse audience, providing an opportunity to target consumers beyond your immediate ecosystem. Integrating with these platforms requires a keen understanding of their unique algorithms, user behaviors and automated systems that make checking compliance and creative specs per platform a breeze.

While this can seem like a lot, modern tech is here to help. By finding a simple-to-start solution that allows you to see big results while you streamline effort, you can set up systems for long-term success that make your life easier in the short term, too.

Get Ready for a New Era of Retail Media Management — Starting Today

Maintaining, working with happy advertisers, and scaling a successful retail media network requires smart use of automation and strategic efficiency enhancements. Start with compliance to reduce the number of stressful content setbacks you encounter, then focus on making the self-service experience for your advertisers as satisfying as possible. This will make growth sustainable — and scaling your retail media empire possible, manageable and profitable.

Tony Santo is the vice president of customer success and professional services at Innervate, a customer experience management software provider.