• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, August 2, 2023

GroupM this morning announced the rollout of a new media-planning tool created explicitly for the burgeoning retail media category -- a marketplace that GroupM currently benchmarks at more than $125 billion in ad spending, and is projected to surpass television by 2028.

The new retail media planning tool, dubbed Fusion, was developed by GroupM's Nexus unit and is available for the clients of all GroupM global media networks, including EssenceMediacom, Mindshare and Wavemaker.

Fusion is a refinement of a sophisticated taxonomy Fusion developed benchmarking the performance of various retail media suppliers, inventory and formats -- including digital, analog and in-store media -- which is now accessible for planners, buyers and client to use when planning retail media buys.

"Fusion’s core is a robust data lake comprising hundreds of commerce data sources and APIs, enriched with the collective intelligence of thousands of global commerce practitioners,"  Nexus said in a statement explaining its evolution. "In tandem with the formalized commerce capabilities under GroupM Nexus Commerce, clients can utilize the offering for better overall investment and retail media allocations."

In a briefing with MediaPost, Nexus North America President JiYoung Kim characterized Fusion as part of an ongoing evolution of data, technology and planning intelligence that is redefining not just retail media explicitly, but all forms of commerce and performance related media, which itself is being transformed by ongoing technological innovation and disruption.

While Fusion currently is designed explicitly as a planning tool, Kim tells MediaPost that Nexus already is developing a second phase that will enable agencies and client to apply it to buying, activating and posting the results of retail media buys, though she did not disclose a time frame for that.

"I think we are past Wave One, which is shifting the dollars that were intended for in-store environments or on-site environments into digitized on-site environments," she explains, adding, "We're heading into Wave Two, which is now taking those capabilities and growing through off-site dollars, which is bumping up directly against performance dollars or even brand dollars."