Creative design can decide whether a retail media network (RMN) ad converts a shopper who is already standing at the point of purchase. How an ad looks in those moments shapes how consumers perceive products and whether they consider buying them, according to a recent Ipsos study.

Finding the right balance between memorable images and simple purchase-driven messages will help campaigns make the most out of brand investment.

• US retail media ad spend is expected to maintain double-digit annual growth through 2029, reaching $112.33 billion in that year, per EMARKETER’s forecast.
• US on-site retail media spend alone is projected to total $56.42 billion this year, according to EMARKETER.

“[In retail media campaigns] context does the targeting work for you, the shopper's location in the purchase journey already tells you what's relevant, so the creative can be simpler and

more direct than a display ad that has to work for an anonymous audience,” said Ryan Cook, vice president of advertising at Disco.

Getting to the point with simple design

Polish stops paying once a shopper has decided whether or not to buy a product. Higher production value earned its keep further up the funnel, lifting brand recall and influence among shoppers still making a decision or out-of-market.

High-quality creative and low-quality creative achieved virtually the same level of behavior change in audiences who had decided, according to the Ipsos analysis. For undecided shoppers, high-quality creative outperformed low-quality creative by 12 percentage points, per Ipsos.

“Retail media creative isn't competing for attention, the shopper is already there with intent,” said Cook. “Its job is to remove friction between that intent and an action. That means leading with the product and the offer, matching the retailer's environment, and giving the shopper exactly one thing to do. Think of it less like a commercial and more like packaging on a shelf.”

Reaching undecided shoppers

The audience worth paying for is the shopper who has not settled on a brand. Ads shown to undecided shoppers performed better on average than ads shown to shoppers who already had one brand in mind. Average behavior change lift ran 9 percentage points higher for undecided consumers than for decided ones, according to the Ipsos study.

“Audience matters, but less in the way most advertisers are used to,” said Cook. “Retail media's real advantage is that segments are built on actual purchase behavior rather than modeled proxies, so the best practice is to segment on behavior and then match the message to the moment.”

Retailer purchase signals tell advertisers which message to run, and which design elements to use depending on where the shopper sees the ad. Producing that many variants by hand is the bottleneck, which is why advertisers should work with their retail media partners and agencies on AI-powered automation for optimization and personalization.

“Creating and managing that level of creative variation at scale is not easy,” said Adam Lee, chief business development officer at AdCellerant. “Brands should consider emerging creative and AI-enabled tools that can help efficiently adapt messaging, imagery, offers, and formats across audiences and placements without requiring an entirely manual production process.”

Lifting campaigns with video

Video is the one place where paying for production quality still pays off in retail media, according to the Ipsos analysis, even though high-quality video ads cost more to produce.

Video moved retail media audiences across several metrics in the Ipsos study, including which brand they chose to buy. Higher-quality ads still mattered more for top-funnel and undecided audiences than for shoppers close to purchase. Video is the exception: It held an edge even at the decision and purchase stages, according to Ipsos.

The margins are wide. On brand linkage, which measures how strongly respondents tied their memories to the brand in the ad, video performed 47 percentage points higher on average in retail media than in other display environments. Video also beat regular display campaigns by 20 percentage points on shifting brand choice, per Ipsos analysis, and by 14 points on “brand closeness,” a measure of long-term brand affinity and future market share.

“Build advertising experiences, both on-site and offsite, that inspire new product discovery, provide useful information, and make shopping easier,” said Lance Wolder, senior vice president, commercial strategy and marketing at PadSquad. “The audience and media plan should inform the creative from the start, giving brands a clearer sense of how to shape the experience.”

This was originally featured in the Commerce Media Weekly newsletter. For more marketing insights, statistics, and trends, subscribe here.