Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
GroupM, WPP’s media investment group, has announced a strategic partnership with Incremental, a leading provider of neutral retail media solutions. The partnership furthers GroupM’s integrated commerce media offering by incorporating Incremental’s retail media forecasting, planning, and measurement capabilities into Open Media Studio — the end-to-end media delivery platform built by Choreograph and available to GroupM teams as part of WPP Open,
The strategic alignment between the two companies will provide GroupM clients with access to new and exclusive AI-driven planning, optimization, and analytics intelligence for retail media. Integrated into Open Media Studio these new capabilities allow GroupM’s client teams to holistically plan and manage retail media alongside other digital media for maximum incremental sales impact.
While retail media remains the fastest growing segment of digital, forecast to add 17.5% in 2024, according to GroupM’s This Year Next Year 2024 Midyear Advertising Forecast, measurement has remained fragmented, with retail media networks operating on disparate attribution methodologies. Through this partnership, GroupM clients can now compare, plan and optimize the effectiveness of their campaigns across both retail and non-retail media networks.
“Planning and measuring retail media comes with more complexity than other digital channels,” said Samantha Bukowski, Global Head of Commerce at GroupM. “By bringing Incremental’s best-in-class retail media capabilities into Open Media Studio, our clients can maximize their retail investments with consistent measurement methodologies, rooted in true incrementality. Our partnership allows advertisers to plan holistically with the required specificity for retail, while also considering their total investments across channels.”
The combination of these capabilities is designed to provide GroupM clients with unique commerce media capabilities in the U.S. market with additional global markets to be added in the future. The new co-engineered retail media solutions benefit clients in the following ways:
- AI-Driven Retail Media Planning: Advertisers will be able to plan and allocate budget holistically, based on predicted incremental retail sales and circumventing non-standardized retail attribution. They can plan and forecast media performance across different retail networks, while placing retail alongside non-retail media for a fully integrated approach.
- Retail Media Optimization: Integrating real-time sales data directly from advertisers’ seats with retail media networks into Open Media Studio’s suite of capabilities to enable AI-powered optimization of in-flight campaigns to drive incremental sales, not just media attributed return on ad spend.
- Retail Media Analytics: Putting Incremental and Choreograph’s neutral retail media measurement capabilities directly into Open Media Studio’s reporting and measurement suite. Advertisers will gain access to daily incrementality data, providing valuable signals on where and how to optimize their retail media investments.
“GroupM is pioneering the future of integrated commerce by bringing together retail media intelligence, data, and technology to break down channel silos,” said David Pollet, CEO of Incremental. “Our partnership challenges the industry to move beyond last-touch metrics toward a standardized measure of multi-channel effectiveness.”
The new integrated retail media capabilities follow the recent recognition of WPP as a leader in commerce services as well as GroupM’s recent announcement of a global partnership with Shalion to integrate its advanced retail media, digital shelf analytics, and unified market intelligence into Open Media Studio. The partnerships with Shalion and now Incremental fuel GroupM’s integrated commerce capabilities placing retail data and technology at the heart of the full marketing proposition.
Incremental helps brands and agencies drive incremental growth from their retail media investments through neutral and transparent measurement. Their approach is designed to be PII-free and compatible with the types of data available from the walled gardens, enabling it to be deployed seamlessly within a brand’s ecosystem of retail and media partners. Their methodology makes use of several well-established techniques to provide both a high degree of predictive accuracy and business utility. The resulting model generates insights granular enough to drive daily campaign optimization decisions while robust enough to be prescriptive in sales forecasting and media planning.
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