Are you tapping into the full potential of retail data?

DNVN - How should retailers adapt their systems to take advantage of the opportunities offered by retail media networks (RMNs) - advertising platforms owned or operated by retailers, allowing businesses to promote products on the retailer's website, app or other digital properties? What challenges will they face and how will they address them?

Retailers understand the importance of the opportunities offered by retail media networks.

The size of the opportunities generated by RMNs from the global RMN market revenue is expected to reach $31.5 billion by 2024, and that's just the beginning.

The market is estimated to be worth $57 billion by 2030, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.5% between 2025 and 2030. In the UK, retail and commercial media is growing at 17.7% a year, making it the second fastest growing media channel after streaming in the UK.

Retailers understand the value of these opportunities, which is reflected in the technology investment decisions and digital retail transformation activities they are pursuing and implementing.

Retail businesses spend the majority of their spending on RMN, customer loyalty platforms, technology and customer experience enhancement.

The ecosystem of a modern retail business that has a strong position in the market often includes hundreds of applications that have been built over many years.

Potential risks in the retail media network journey

Current investment decisions target retailers understanding that they need to get into RMNs quickly to avoid the risk of being left behind in the rapid growth phase of RMNs.

At the same time, businesses also noted that investing in RMN is not without risk.

Successful RMN implementation requires integrated operations and data sharing across internal systems. The best opportunities and risks lie in expanding the potential for collaboration with partner businesses.

To capitalize on the opportunities, retail businesses must keep up with the latest technologies and developments in a rapidly evolving sector, but this is no easy task.

However, retailers face an even bigger problem. As businesses begin to embrace RMN and implement new technology, are they losing sight of the source of all opportunity – their customers?

Balancing the appropriate retail media network structure

As we can see, the opportunities are huge, but so are the risks. So how are progressive retailers currently seizing the opportunities while maintaining the customer experience?

Below are some of the issues we identified and discussed. What all of them have in common is the need to change the internal organizational and cultural approach. Leading retailers in the UK recognise that RMN impacts every area of ​​the business and therefore believe it is essential to take into account the wider context of the whole organisation when planning software development projects.

Dangers of building on unstable foundations

The first issue that comes to mind when viewed through an organization-wide lens is the instability of the software ecosystem in the modern retail enterprise.

The ecosystem of a modern, established retail business typically consists of hundreds of applications that have been built over many years. These foundations are often legacy systems. The nature of DevOps processes is to create systems with technical debt at every stage of the lifecycle. DevOps processes create the need for frequent application updates, which can and does impact the upstream and downstream processes of the application being updated.

New retail businesses, operating entirely in digital environments, typically have a leaner, more integrated architecture. However, for traditional retail organizations, this complexity is a significant obstacle to adopting new technologies such as RMS. Additionally, RMNs rely on systems that were originally designed for other purposes, such as customer loyalty systems and ERP systems, to generate additional revenue for the supplier.

Mr. Nick Hudson - B2B Technology Director Keysight Technologies.

The problem is that as we acknowledge that RMNs must sit atop this ecosystem, every system below them must operate and connect more seamlessly than ever before. Data quality further complicates matters: as systems are connected, discrepancies and inconsistencies in data become apparent, such as outdated or incomplete product and customer data, or skewed sales data. These issues can undermine the effectiveness of RMN campaigns. Furthermore, partner businesses will increasingly demand access to high-quality, reliable data to justify their investment in retail media campaigns. Without clear, consistent, and actionable data, retailers risk losing out on key media spend.

To overcome the problem, progressive retail businesses realize that effective software development now requires a new approach.

Traditionally, the overall assessment of new software and its role in improving the customer journey would be considered at the requirements generation stage and often forgotten as teams moved into detailed development.

Now, the overall role of the software and the customer experience in general must be focused on throughout the development process.

This is the only way to build a truly comprehensive test plan that meets customer experience and vendor needs, ensuring the software performs as expected.

This shift can be seen as a change from a close-up to a bird's-eye view in software development.

What role does quality play?

The changing process raises questions about quality and its place in the development process. Typically, quality requirements are considered later in the development process. As mentioned above, at this point, the original reason for developing the software and its desired impact on the customer experience may no longer be a top priority.

In this case, quality assurance (QA) processes can only focus on functional testing because those are the only measurable metrics. Thus, an important opportunity to evaluate the customer experience is wasted.

This opportunity is also wasted during the maintenance phase, because no one remembers the original development goals of the software. Especially when maintenance work is outsourced to a third party.

The need for measurement further adds to the complexity of RMNs. Retailers must not only test how data flows within internal systems – including eCommerce, loyalty platforms, inventory, and ERP systems – but also validate how the data communicates with external media platforms. These media require high-integrity data to enable targeted, personalized, and distributed campaigns. Therefore, measurement strategies must take into account the broader RMN ecosystem, with processes that ensure quality for internal data flows, customer-facing experiences, and seamless integration with vendor-side media systems.

Next comes the question of end-to-end quality accountability. What happens during handoffs between systems? Does an update have unexpected impacts on processes in other systems? Where are there opportunities for improvement along the way?

To address these issues, forward-thinking retailers are looking to integrate QA into their systems. The goal is to prioritize the customer experience while also driving retail technology risk management processes.

Using AI in retail helps improve resource efficiency

Alongside the issues of unstable platforms and QA processes are issues that affect every retail business – time and money. In an industry with thin margins, there is a need to improve resource efficiency.

Retail businesses want and need to devote more resources to developing an effective and robust RMN. However, they need to create enough bandwidth to achieve this goal.

Keysight provides a way to create this bandwidth and more. The company offers a comprehensive retail test automation solution that automates quality assurance in the retail space. Keysight’s AI-powered robots test POS terminals and connected physical devices. Keysight Eggplant automates the test process across e-commerce, mobile, and back-end retail systems—including all interactions between systems. Automating all of these test processes frees up resources and creates more bandwidth.

These tools also provide the ability to leverage AI in retail decision-making so developers can use real-world metrics, rather than intuition, and focus testing resources.

Equally important in the new “holistic” approach to development is that the solution simplifies the technology layers as a single tool can comprehensively, integratedly measure the entire retail system.

Nick Hudson - B2B Technology Director Keysight Technologies,

Source: https://doanhnghiepvn.vn/chuyen-doi-so/ban-da-khai-thac-het-tiem-nang-cua-du-lieu-ban-le/20250911042215673