Threefold-Agency has been spreading its international wings over the last few months, attending events in the US with LiveRamp, Shoptalk and the National Retail Federation since the start of the year.
We were therefore thrilled to be invited to talk with the Path to Purchase Institute alongside our retal partner Ollie Shayer (Boots UK) on the topic of everything #retailmedia. In particular, we discuss the variances in dominent retail media between the UK and the US, with Ollie Shayer giving an insight into how Boots UK are brining more digital opportunities to their in-store estate, something Threefold-Agency is proud to be a part of.
Read the full article on pages 8 and 9 here.
Shopper behaviour in the UK has not only influenced how consumers are marketed to, but it's also shaped the general definition of retail media in the country. When discussing retail media in the US, generally marketers are refering to ecommerce, digital and programmatic advertising, whereas in the UK, in-store solutions come to mind first. Shoppers in the UK are mainly driven by in-store promotions and presence - it's much more in the moment which makes the shopper behaviour in-store easier to manipulate in a positive way for a brand.
Sam Knights, SMG
Offsite advertising is still growing in Europe. It's not maybe at the scale yet that the US is, in the sense of driving a lot more of the offsite activity through things like Meta, through DSP partners and the utilization of data through that. I think it's predominantly becuase the data regulations in Europe are obviously quite different from the US. When I talk to my colleagues at Walgreens, I'm always very envious of the data availability they have.
Ollie Shayer, Boots UK
The sophistication of what you can do in-store in the UK and Europe is actually ahead of where the US is, but the sophistication of what you can do digitally is way ahead in the US than it is in the UK. We've started from different places, I think , and that's because of the shopper behaviour and because the impact that you can have in a physical sense is much greater here in the UK.
Sam Knights, SMG
For Boots, the idea is more of a digitization of the in-store environment, so things can be changed more easily centrally, but also we provide suppliers with easier interfaces to do that. So they can upload their content into it quite easily, we can approve it ... and we can push it out within 30 minutes into the store environment.
Ollie Shayer, Boots UK
I think the biggest thing for us (when building Boots Media Group) was not to create an external entity that felt like it was an agency. I think that's been an incredible piece of work from the guys at Threefold (an SMG agency) to really integrate into the Boots environment.
Ollie Shayer, Boots UK