The category was too new for published sources to answer
A proposal and business development team was being asked about retail media, which is advertising that brands buy from the retailers selling their products. Clients wanted a view, and the team had questions instead of one. Every conversation they walked into asked them to say what was working, and the answer they had came from the same public sources their competitors were reading.
Vendor material described products. Trade press described announcements. Neither described what was working for the brands actually spending money, because the category had grown more quickly than anyone could write about it credibly. The people who could say what happened last quarter were the ones running retail media inside retailers, buying it inside brands, and planning it inside agencies.
We put the people already doing it around one table
We assembled an advisory board across the three sides of the market: former retail media leads from the retailer side, former brand investment directors from the companies spending the money, and former agency heads who plan where it goes. We looked for people who had run the work rather than people who comment on it, because the category already has plenty of commentary.
Sessions were called when something moved in the market rather than on a fixed calendar, because the category was changing more quickly than a schedule could follow. Each session was written up for client conversations rather than for internal analysis, so the team could use it in a pitch. The record built up in Nextyn IQ, so the team could go back to it later.
The team could say where their view came from
The team could now describe what was working for brands rather than what vendors were announcing, and could name the kind of practitioner the view came from. That changed the shape of the client conversation. Arriving with a position is a different proposition from arriving with an offer to go and find out.
The board also gave the team early sight of where the category was heading, before it showed up in the trade press. That shaped which opportunities the function chose to pursue, which is a decision it had previously been making on vendor announcements.
