Since 2008, Threefold has been building and operating retail media networks in-house for retailers across the UK and North America. Clients new and old include household names such as Deliveroo, Boots, Co-op, The Very Group, Signet Jewelers and Morrisons just to name a few…
Last month at Retail Media Summit UK, Threefold’s UK MD, Rosie Houston, spoke exclusively to FMCG podcast host Daniel Torres Dwyer about her career to date, the changes in retail media in the last 12 months, and what’s next for retailer media networks, retailers and brands alike. Watch the interview exclusively in full now or check out the highlights below.
Q: Tell us about your career to date?
Rosie Houston: Most of my career has been in retail. I spent a couple of years with Superdrug, then spent 13 years with Boots. For about a decade I was in buying, then I moved over to what was then called the partnership marketing function. It wasn’t called retail media at that time. I worked in that area of the business for seven years, and it’s grown and evolved and expanded.
Q: How has retail media evolved in the past 12 months?
RH: Capabilities around first party data are coming on in leaps and bounds. We’ve seen more and more retailers open their eyes to the power of first party data. Our retailers are all at different stages of the maturity curve. Some are just grappling with the initial stages, trying to build first party data engines. But other partners are looking at how they offer self-serve options, how they build agency relationships.
I’m also really excited about the digitization of in-store. At times retail media has almost become synonymous with digital media, but for a lot of our partners, at least 70% of their sales are still coming through in-store. So we can’t do this brilliant job online, and when you get in-store, it’s irrelevant.
Q: Where do you think the industry will be at the beginning of 2025?
RH: There’ll be more retail media centres than there are today. Lots of other retailers will get involved but, by 2025, some of them may have been whittled down. Those that can offer the best data-driven capabilities will still be around.
Capability advancements will continue. There will be greater levels of standardisation, which is a hot topic right now. And there’s likely to be more interaction between retail media networks and agencies as well. We’re seeing that dynamic coming out, but there’s a lot of work to do to understand how that can work in reality.
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This year Retail Media Summit UK, or as we like to call it “The Retail Media event of the year”, brought together a room full of cross-atlantic industry professionals to delve deeper into the value of retail media for both retailers & brands. Both the UK and US markets were represented by true experts, giving everyone an opportunity to learn from the challenges and opportunities the other is facing.
We’re incredibly excited to be once again co-hosting next year's Summit with the Path to Purchase Institute (P2PI), the leading publication in the United States that offers consumer product marketing executives and brand managers a holistic, 360-degree view of the shopper journey.
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