Is the programmatic advertising industry in a rut?
Maybe just call it a midlife crisis, says JiYoung Kim, president for North America at GroupM Nexus, the recently launched performance division of WPP-owned GroupM.
Programmatic has become the main way that most brands and their agencies buy media, but that doesn’t mean that programmatic is fulfilling its promise, Kim says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
“I think programmatic is due for some excitement,” says Kim. And some innovation.
But there are promising bright spots.
Retail media, for example, and commerce media more broadly, are poised to continue their explosive growth trajectory.
According to GroupM’s most recent ad forecast, retail media will grow 9.9% to nearly $126 billion this year and make up 15.4% of total ad revenue by 2028 – which is also when GroupM predicts retail media will surpass television revenue. Sniffing the opportunity, GroupM recently unified all of its commerce functions within GroupM Nexus and promoted Samantha Bukowski to lead that division as global head of commerce.
Retail media is “a massive field, especially considering how young it is,” Kim says. “Commerce is going to disrupt everything.”
But isn’t retail media just another inventory and data source? Retailers are launching their own ad networks. What’s so exciting about an ad network?
That’s a bit like asking what’s so exciting about oxygen.
Over the next few years, retail media will go through a similar transformation as happened with mobile, which has become so pervasive that it touches nearly everything.
“The fact that most search and social platforms are mobile … we don’t really think about that anymore,” Kim says. “[And] that’s what’s going to happen to commerce.”
Also in this episode: The retail media opportunity writ large, why GroupM Nexus developed its own platform for retail media planning, combatting made-for-advertising websites, what it means in practice to be “performance-minded,” Korean/Spanish fusion cuisine and Kim’s most hated marketing buzzwords.
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