Aligning on audience targeting is a key step in the road to mutual success for retailers, brands, and media companies.
By Amy Andrews, President of Mars United Commerce
I moderated a panel discussion at Shoptalk Spring that used a format I love because it united two case studies exploring unique aspects of the partnerships across brands, retailers, and media companies that are so critical to best-in-class commerce marketing these days.
I was joined first by Taryn Dominie, Head of Industry for The Home Depot’s Orange Apron Media, and Andy Lopez, Head of Global Marketing for Behr Paint Company, which have enjoyed an exclusive category partnership for more than 45 years. (Both are pictured below).
Effective retail media activation for Behr and Orange Apron Media is based on targeting the right audiences, which also reflects the heart of what we’re doing at Publicis Commerce right now around identity and personalization — and really what we’ve been trying to do with our marketing at Mars United forever: getting the right message, to the right person, at the right time.
Behr and Home Depot are innovating in targeting by going way beyond segmenting the retailer’s audience into do-it-yourselfers and professionals to identify niche, customized segments within each group — like “residential repainters” in the case of professionals — to deliver relevant messaging that specifically addresses how they shop.
The second case study featured a new partnership announced just one day before the panel discussion, a collaborative agreement between Kroger and Google to make all of the grocer’s wonderful shopper data available for ad campaigns across the Google ecosystem — including YouTube, where users are watching 90 million hours of shopping-related videos per day. Brands can connect that behavior to shopper data from Kroger (and soon, other retailers) to make those purchases more relevant and optimize them in real time.
Both of these conversations presented some enlightening points of view on how traditional brand-retailer relationships are evolving and improving through enhanced technology. From my perspective, there were three key takeaways from the session:
- Audiences are the edge. Refining audiences and developing a deep understanding of individual shoppers is the best way to gain the edge in marketing by delivering truly custom solutions. The more precisely we can identify and activate unique audiences, the stronger our results will be.
- Measurement is (still) the unlock. Retail media wins when it can prove the real business outcomes that are taking place. There is still work to do around measurement, and everyone acknowledges that we’re improving as an industry in this regard. But there’s still huge opportunity to better measure the business impact so we really know where to spend the next dollar.
- Connection is the future. We talked a lot about connections, of course, which logically leads to discussing connected commerce. It was great to hear these partners speak in unison about breaking down those traditional funnel divisions and treating media more holistically to determine where we can best convert, whether that’s national media or shopper media. That’s a very exciting direction for our industry to take for the future.
And speaking of the future, we definitely heard a lot about AI at Shoptalk. In my panel, Andy Lopez explained how Behr is using AI agents to give people greater confidence in their journey, helping them find the best paint solutions for their specific needs. It makes a lot of sense to think about leveraging AI in ways like these that are beneficial to shoppers, particularly in categories like home improvement where they have a lot of questions to ask. Our goal as marketers is to make sure we’re in the right place to answer them.
About the Author
As President of Mars United Commerce, Amy Andrews leads the commerce marketing company’s strategy and operations in North America. She has spent her 20-year marketing career focused on understanding how shoppers shop and creating engaging commerce experiences on both the agency and client side, including leading the shopper marketing & insights team at Ubisoft Entertainment.
In her nearly 15 years of tenure at Mars United, she has co-founded an in-house strategic consultancy, launched the first international office in London, and opened the company’s first Seattle office to service Mars’ clients’ growing Amazon business. Most recently, she served as Chief Business Strategy Officer, overseeing activity for all North American brand clients. Amy became President when Mars United Commerce was acquired by The Publicis Groupe in 2024.
