A gaggle of business 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 yr, with main retailers taking over house 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 Finest 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 grow to be one of many main business analysts on retail media, and the consultancy’s founding advisor and knowledge 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 business grows. Whereas they wouldn’t share particular purchasers, Bryan stated they span a various array of adtech, and the corporate is at the moment in talks with potential purchasers on each the availability 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 Finest Purchase in 2004. Sitting in conferences with retailers and large distributors like Intel and Microsoft, the conversations have been half about media. After spending a number of years as service provider director to know how you can begin an advert community inside Finest Purchase, I developed a marketing strategy, arguing that we have been “a media firm in denial” and we wanted a plan to come back out of denial. Beginning in about 2010 and carrying on till I left the corporate, I used to be main Finest Purchase media on the demand aspect, our funding groups and constructing what grew to become Finest Purchase Adverts.
A couple of years in the past, I began to appreciate that as a result of Finest Purchase had gotten such an early begin, we have been perhaps the primary huge retailer to construct, from the beginning, loads 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 yr, and I had individually made the choice already to go unbiased at that time, and this was an opportunity to do one thing larger.
