The trends in Ad Agency Land over the past few years have been in favor of Publicis. The French holding company has assembled a portfolio of data and ad tech, including Profitero, Epsilon and CitrusAd, and Wall Street investors like the strategy.
Jason Colon, until recently Publicis’ EVP and managing director of retail media, told AdExchanger it was great to have access to those different pieces, like Profitero’s digital shelf analytics and the Epsilon data marketplace. But Colon has taken a new role as EVP of Commerce Media at Horizon’s retail media agency Night Market.
Does Horizon plan to follow in Publicis’ footsteps by acquiring data and tech solutions? Or does he see an opportunity to differentiate from the current holdco champion?
AdExchanger caught up with Colon to understand more about his change in job and other changes afoot in the retail media category.
AdExchanger: So why the switch to Horizon’s Night Market?
JASON COLON: It’s a pretty unique opportunity to help scale the business to the next level. And it gets me at the center of the agency, whereas I was working centrally at the holding company level to support the agencies at my previous role.
I really had an ambition and desire to get closer to clients, and believed in the model and the strategy that Night Market and Horizon overall have taken.
What in particular drew you to Night Market’s strategy?
The strategy of building technology-enabled services, in particular in retail media where there’s such complexity around the various data sets and fragmentation across the network.
The lack of standardization is critical, and Neon [an ecommerce data analytics software business launched by Night Market in 2023] addresses a lot of those pain points to commerce media investment. And by that I mean the platform is pulling in disparate data sets, whether it’s media, ecommerce, data sets directly from retailers or the digital shelf data that we’re able to access.
Neon also has a series of models built into the platform that enable us to do algorithmic investment planning and optimization based on incrementality.
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“Incrementality” is a hot topic in this space right now. But given the lack of standardization for measurement and the challenges using a metric like ROAS, which in my opinion is an antiquated approach to understanding what’s working and what’s not from a media investment perspective, Neon gives us the ability to help clients understand true incremental return on investment. Which is not just a powerful story, but has had a powerful impact for clients.
“Incrementality” is a major buzzword for sure. But I am dubious of “incremental” sales as a retail media KPI. That “incremental” sale could be a customer from a year ago or at a new address or throwaway email – or someone that platform hadn’t converted for you before even if they’re a regular customer.
Whether it’s a “new to brand” metric or an incrementality report that’s coming directly from the retailer, the retailers or platforms only have access to a sliver of information. In some cases, that sliver is rather scaled, like an Amazon or a Walmart. But still, they’re not looking at cross-retail shopping behavior.
A platform “new to brand” metric is not incrementality; it is a signal to help indicate where incrementality might come from. Complementing what you get from the retail platforms with modeling and the ability to look holistically across platforms and influences on shopping behavior is the best way to do it. But that’s rather complex. Quite a bit goes into building econometric models on the fly. But the investment is too high in retail media for brands to be relying on the retailers to grade their own homework.
Is there any type of tool or data provider that you had at Publicis that you’re eager to bring to Night Market?
I’m day three, so I’m not ready to say necessarily which partners and tools make sense to complement our stack.
But what I will say is the difference between Publicis and Horizon’s Night Market is obviously that Publicis has acquired quite a bit from a technology and data perspective. And that leaves Publicis with an incentive to steer clients and prospects toward their own assets. And that’s not to say Profitero is not a great data asset, nor that Epsilon isn’t very powerful, but there’s something to be said about independence and the ability to work with the marketplace. I believe there’s value in being able to take advantage of the innovation happening across independent partners that aren’t part of the holding company model.
Night Market is obviously on the demand side. But are you building direct partnerships and relationships with the sell side, retailers and ecommerce media in this case?
There’s quite a bit of investment flowing through – not just Night Market, but the Horizon holding business – to platforms like Amazon and other retailers. The scale and the leverage that we have through our total investment help us unlock unique partnerships. And I mean partnerships beyond rates: access to technology, access to co-engineering endeavors, etc.
Those retailer partnerships help us bring on new brands.
If you could snap your fingers and tomorrow land either a new blue-chip brand client or an exclusive major retail partnership, which would you choose?
I’ll take the revenue first, as I think my boss and my boss’s boss would prefer. I think unique sell-side partnerships will bring more revenue opportunities. But we’re in growth mode.
Although, that’s a big part of why I’m here. Because I like to build things and I’m looking forward to shaping this next evolution of the business.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
