A gaggle of trade veterans with expertise creating, constructing, supporting and analyzing retail media networks way back to 2004 introduced a brand new enterprise: Colosseum Technique.
Commerce media has swept via the Cannes Lions Competition this 12 months, with main retailers taking over area on the seashores and within the harbor whereas businesses and tech platforms announce new retail-media-focused instruments and partnerships day by day.
Keith Bryan, the consultancy’s CEO and founder, spent 20 years at Greatest Purchase creating the retailer’s media enterprise and shepherding it via its first decade-and-a-half.
Co-founder Yara Daher was constructing RMNs at HookLogic—later acquired by Criteo—on behalf of majors like Walmart and Goal again in 2014.
Andrew Lipsman, Colosseum’s founding adviser and strategist, has turn into one of many main trade analysts on retail media, and the consultancy’s founding advisor and information architect, Daniel Knapp, is chief economist at IAB Europe.
ADWEEK caught up with Bryan and Lipsman throughout Cannes to listen to how the brand new agency goals to fill a information hole within the commerce media panorama because the trade grows. Whereas they wouldn’t share particular shoppers, Bryan stated they span a various array of adtech, and the corporate is at present in talks with potential shoppers on each the provision and demand aspect, together with non-retail.
This dialog has been edited and condensed for readability.
What’s the Colosseum Technique backstory?
Bryan: I joined Greatest Purchase in 2004. Sitting in conferences with retailers and large distributors like Intel and Microsoft, the conversations have been half about media. After spending just a few years as service provider director to know learn how to begin an advert community inside Greatest Purchase, I developed a marketing strategy, arguing that we have been “a media firm in denial” and we would have liked a plan to return out of denial. Beginning in about 2010 and carrying on till I left the corporate, I used to be main Greatest Purchase media on the demand aspect, our funding groups and constructing what turned Greatest Purchase Advertisements.
Just a few years in the past, I began to comprehend that as a result of Greatest Purchase had gotten such an early begin, we have been possibly the primary massive retailer to construct, from the beginning, a variety of inner integration. We have been fixing new issues sooner.
Lipsman: The forces aligned. Keith had this imaginative and prescient on the finish of final 12 months, and I had individually made the choice already to go impartial at that time, and this was an opportunity to do one thing larger.
