Who’s Buying? A Sell-Side View with Shay Brog of Burt
Who's buying, where are they spending, and how can a media company tell whether a change in performance is specific to its own business or happening across the market?
Burt Intelligence CEO Shay Brog joined Tom Limongello and Scott Messer on The Middlemen Podcast to discuss how publishers and retail media networks can use market-level advertising data to answer those questions.
The Middlemen focuses on the intersection of retail media, commerce, advertising technology and e-commerce. The conversation explores what publishers and retailers have in common when it comes to fragmented data, revenue operations, forecasting and understanding advertiser demand.
Publishers and retail media networks face a similar data problem
Media businesses generate enormous amounts of information across ad servers, SSPs, DSPs, order management systems, CRM platforms, commerce systems and other parts of the advertising stack. But having the data does not automatically make it useful.
The discussion looks at the operational challenge of aggregating and normalizing those sources so teams can answer basic commercial questions consistently. That applies to traditional digital publishers, but increasingly to retail and commerce media businesses as well.
Retail media adds its own complexity. Advertising data may need to be understood alongside commerce outcomes, highly seasonal demand patterns, endemic and non-endemic advertisers, and media running across on-site, off-site and in-store environments.
Benchmarking
Separate changes in your own business from broader changes in the advertising market.
Advertiser intelligence
Understand which advertisers are active in the market and where commercial opportunities may exist.
Forecasting
Plan around changing and highly seasonal inventory and demand, particularly in retail and commerce media.
Revenue reconciliation
Bring fragmented platform data together so reporting and billing can operate from consistent numbers.
“Am I down, or is everyone down?”
A publisher or retail media network may know that CPMs, revenue or advertiser spending changed. What its own data cannot necessarily answer is whether the movement is unique to that business or part of a broader market shift.
Burt Benchmarks add that external market context by allowing media companies to compare their own performance with activity across the broader Burt Data Network.
From market signals to sales opportunities
The conversation also explores what happens when market intelligence moves beyond performance measurement.
If a media company can understand which advertisers are buying, how their activity is changing, and where they are spending elsewhere in the market, those signals can become useful to sales teams.
Burt Leads applies that idea to prospecting, surfacing advertiser opportunities based on observed market activity. Instead of starting with a static account list, sellers can identify signals such as new advertisers entering the market, existing customers with additional spending elsewhere, or accounts showing signs of growth.
Why forecasting matters differently in retail and commerce media
The episode also touches on the particular forecasting challenges facing retail media networks. Retail and commerce businesses often operate around strong seasonal patterns, major shopping events and inventory that behaves differently from traditional publisher supply.
That makes historical context especially important. Reliable ad inventory forecasting may need to account for events such as holiday shopping periods, back-to-school demand and other recurring commercial cycles rather than relying only on recent delivery.
One data foundation, different media businesses
Publishers and retailers may come to media from very different starting points, but the underlying operational challenge is increasingly similar: connect fragmented systems, establish consistent definitions, understand performance in context, and turn that information into better commercial decisions.
That's the common thread through the conversation: better decisions depend not simply on having more data, but on making advertising and commerce data consistent enough to use across reporting, forecasting, reconciliation, benchmarking and sales.
Watch or listen to The Middlemen Podcast
The Middlemen covers retail media, commerce, advertising technology and e-commerce. Visit the original episode page for the full conversation and additional listening options.
View the original episode