LAS VEGAS — Organizations struggling to move from siloed data to actionable cross-channel insights should start small and prioritize progress over comprehensive solutions that never launch.
“It’s about simplification and everyone seems to be wanting to boil the ocean, and that’s always hard,” Cristina Marinucci, VP Global Growth & Omni Commercial Insights at Mondelēz International, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at Groceryshop. “I think we get stuck in perfection and we need to do everything. So it’s really about simplifying and prioritizing and starting with something small.”
This approach focuses on solving critical business questions with targeted data connections rather than attempting comprehensive integration across all systems simultaneously.
Stewardship over ownership
Breaking down data silos requires shifting organizational mindset from data ownership to data stewardship, prioritizing accessibility and usability over control.
“It’s really about moving from data ownership to data stewardship, and it’s less so about who controls the data, who owns the data, and more about how do we make the data more usable and accessible,” Marinucci said.
This transformation centers on establishing one source of truth across sales, media, shopper insights, and retailer partnerships, combined with proper KPIs, governance frameworks, and democratized systems that enable organization-wide interpretation.
Scale and size matters
While scale matters when evaluating retail media partners, Mondelēz stresses innovation, incrementality, interoperability, and data transparency when determining where to invest.
“Size matters when we think about retail media providers, but it’s not the only thing that matters,” Marinucci said. “What we are looking for in our retail media partnerships is also innovation. So what are those new ad formats that’s really going to drive that engagement and experience with our shoppers, as well as remove the friction points.”
The brand seeks partners offering robust measurement capabilities, systems that integrate with existing ecosystems for consistent cross-platform analysis, and willingness to collaborate on real-time optimization and test-and-learn initiatives.
Clean rooms: “incomplete”
Clean room technology provides critical infrastructure for combining retailer and brand data to measure incrementality at brand and category levels, but represents an enabler rather than a complete solution.
“Clean rooms are instrumental for bringing together the retailer data with our data to understand incrementality not just at the brand level, but category level. Are we driving new households, new occasions, new cohorts into the category?” Marinucci said. “They’re not a silver bullet alone, though. They are an enabler. They’re the tech enabler, but not the solution.”
Success requires consistent measurement frameworks that enable equitable comparison across retail media providers to identify which partnerships drive the most incremental value throughout the funnel.
What CTV delivers
The convergence of commerce media, retail media, and connected TV creates opportunities for targeted personalization that connects messaging to immediate conversion through what Mondelēz calls “media to shelf” or “content to commerce.”
“CTV really allows us to deliver the messages in the right moment to those cohorts and connect it straight to a conversion that will just amplify our marketing and be more precision targeted against those specific occasions during the right day parts with the right message,” Marinucci said.
This capability enables brands to reach specific audience segments with contextually relevant messaging timed to drive purchase behavior.
Critical business questions first
Rather than attempting to connect all data sets comprehensively, brands should identify their most critical business question and connect only the data necessary to answer it.
“Not all data sets need to be connected on day one, so what is the most critical business question you’re trying to solve for? And then what are those data sets that you’ll need to connect in order to unlock that?” Marinucci said. “For us, it’s really connecting the media to that actual sale in store.”
“Once we get 70, 80% there to continue to progress and iterate instead of stalling,” Marinucci said. “I do think that’s where a lot of organizations seem to get stuck.”