I recently collaborated with Alan Wolk and the folks at TVREV on a new report focused on the state of Retail Media, and its would-be convergence with CTV.

One area of focus that really stood out to me is the swirl of hope surrounding the concept of making TV advertising more commerce friendly, and how that butts up against the real challenges facing the industry — from consumers’ reticence to fragmentation, to the way budgets are organized. Here’s an excerpt:

“There is going to be a lot of trial and error in shoppable TV,” said Dave Peterson, General Manager, Global Head of Retail Media at Epsilon. “There are many different ways to make things shoppable [which is good and bad]. I see these early days as being about testing and learning.”

The biggest challenge lies in the fact that consumers have not historically taken to interacting with TV ads — let alone shopping from them.

The inclusion of far more QR codes in recent years has helped move things forward. But for shoppable TV to become a major ad category, there will likely need to be a collective effort to train consumers as this is essentially a new behavior, and to eliminate the friction in the process, which has to be easy and seamless.

“The most tantalizing opportunity in retail media is CTV,” said analyst Andrew Lipsman, who writes the newsletter Media, Ads + Commerce. “The constraints right now are inventory, and the fact that the pipes haven’t been laid.”

“What we need to solve for is, how do we get to the place where you see an ad, and go straight to a website or app,” said Peterson. “That has to become a very streamlined experience….”

“The biggest constraint on [growth] right now is that agencies don’t know who owns the budget,” added Miles Fisher, Head of Strategic Ad Partnerships at Roku. “You have shopper marketing, and video investment teams, and they are on a crash course with programmatic.”

“At the end of the day, scale and differentiation will matter.”

Retail Media On CTV 2024

In our latest Special Report, we explore why Retail Media and Connected TV (CTV) are shaping up to be the next big opportunity for advertisers.

Other news this week:

• Ulta Beauty expands retail media network, welcomes non-beauty advertisers - Zofia Zwieglinska [Glossy]

• Grubhub Enters the Ad Game, Taking on Uber Eats and DoorDash - Lauren Johnson [Adweek]

• Spotify launching an ad exchange, will partner with Trade Desk - Sara Fischer [Axios]