CANNES – Published July 31st, 2023 — Omnicom used Cannes Lions to announce a slew of digital ad partnerships and its own new retail media initiatives.

The agency group launched Omni Commerce, an “orchestration solution” for retail media.

In this video interview with Beet.TV at Cannes, Megan Pagliuca, Chief Activation Officer, Omnicom Media Group, talks about the announcements.

Connecting Commerce

Omni Commerce is “an ecosystem of tools, technology, data, and partnerships that enables always-on insight, activation, optimization, and attribution across the entire commerce landscape”, according to an announcement.

It includes data from retailers Albertson’s, Amazon, Instacart, Kroger and Walmart, as well as data vendors. It aims to show a customer’s commerce journey, including with sight of offline behaviour.

A major challenge is understanding how to bring retail media and e-tail budgets into brand budgets, Pagliuca says.

The Need for Retail Media Standards

But Pagliuca also highlights the need for standards in retail media. “We end up talking about things like your methodology on calculating ROI or incrementality for hours across each retail media network that’s looking at it very differently,” she says. “We need to create standards there.”

To address this issue, Omnicom is launching CASA Retail, an evolution of its previously established Council of Accountability and Social Advertising (CASA). CASA Retail aims to create standards within the retail media space, with Albertsons as its launch partner.

“We believe we have a huge opportunity to move this space forward in terms of standards,” Pagliuca says.

Unique Data Integration with Uber

On Tuesday, Omnicom announced a first-to-market partnership with Uber.

This unique data integration into Omni’s open orchestration platform offers insights on consumer journeys, audience creation within Uber inventory and measurement within Uber Eats.

Omnicom is believed to be Uber’s first major-agency partner.

Multi-Party Clean Room Capability with Snowflake
Omnicom’s announcement on Wednesday included partnerships with Paramount, NBC and Warner Bros. Discovery, all working on the Snowflake platform.

The aim is, planners and investment teams across OMG agencies OMD, PHD and Hearts & Science will be able to directly connect advertising campaigns to purchase data.

“We’ve been looking and approaching the upfronts for years and trying to really build a better data asset that allows us to across linear and streaming. We’ve been able to do that, but there are still gaps that existed,” Pagliuca explains.

With Snowflake’s multi-party clean room capability, Omnicom can now connect all streaming data to ACR and set-top box data to see linear viewing, offering a full, cross-publisher, de-duplicated reach and frequency across holistic video.

Unique Relationship with Criteo

On Thursday, Omnicom announced a relationship with Criteo. “Criteo has launched Commerce Grid, which is their SSP that has commerce data assets within it,” Pagliuca says.

“We announced a data collaboration via info via their clean room.

This collaboration allows Omnicom to bring client first-party data and Omni data assets to Commerce Grid and work with the client’s primary chosen DSP to access those data assets.