What you need to know:

• Endeavour Group’s MixIn retailer media division is eight strong, started campaigns in November and preparing to pitch for as much of the $200m agencies spend on alcohol advertising as it can. Plus there's a long tail of suppliers. 
• Powered by Microsoft’s commerce ad platform PromoteIQ, new chief Lachlan Brahe said there could be links to Netflix’s Microsoft-powered ad platform in the future. 
• MixIn is a largely self-service offering, which Brahe hopes will mean it can work more closely with agencies as well as brands than other retailer media businesses. 

The newest kid on the retailer media block, Endeavour Group’s MixIn, is eyeing a $400m alcohol market, a spend boom leading up to Christmas – and an eventual tie in with Netflix advertising via a mutual deal with Microsoft.

MixIn launched in September for Endeavour’s alcohol retailers BWS and Dan Murphy’s, allowing brands to promote their products through digital and in-store ads. The Head of Retail Media, Lachlan Brahe, said its new self-service ad platform, which is backed by Microsoft’s PromoteIQ, went live in early November and has been met with strong interest from suppliers. By the end of a September video launch, there were 30 meetings locked in with brands. Ad spend, Brahe insisted, will be incremental to existing trade marketing deals and MixIn would work closely with agencies. Agencies have spent little directly with Woolworths’ retailer media business, Cartology.

“If you set up a retail media business to cannibalise what you're currently doing in trade, I don't really understand the point of it. If it's new inventory for trade, then that doesn't make any sense to me at all,” Brahe said.

“The purposes I see retail media is not about proximity to point of sale or price driven promotion. It is about proximity to customers, identifying new ones, understanding the nature of your relationship with existing customers, whether they're loyalists or they're in category, but they're not using your brand - and all those different types of things that marketing try to solve for as opposed to what trade try to solve for.”

$200m doubled

Media agencies spent about $200 million in 2021 in the alcohol category, per Standard Media Index, up 19 per cent and a record for the sector. Brahe said it was an industry with “a big, long tail and a lot of direct billing”. “That could potentially double it for us. The size of the prize is interesting enough for us to have pursued this in the first place,” he said.

“I would look at the number of our suppliers who don't work through an agency – and remember, we don't have 40 or 50 tier one clients the way that a Cartology would, we'd have maybe six to 10. We're getting briefs from people who are literally checking their grapes at six in the morning and then running their paid social campaigns themselves at three in the afternoon. So they've not got a luxury of agency planners and account servicing and all of that sort of stuff. Again, another principle for us in making it really easy to kind of get into.”

While there are many smaller brands in the alcohol sector, many of which don’t use agencies, MixIn has found they’ve been taking the lead in conversations. “They're being part of that briefing process and they are actually asking us more of those sorts of strategic questions,” Brahe said.

Close to 98 per cent of in-store Dan Murphy’s or BWS customers walk out having made a purchase, Brahe said. There is such saturation of customers, he added, that instead of ‘retailer media’ or ‘commerce media’, the emerging media businesses like MixIn could really be called ‘customer media’.

Netflix and deal

Using Microsoft’s technology could provide unexpected benefits for MixIn. Netflix launched its ad-supported “Basic with Ads” tier from November 4, costing $6.99 a month for Australians - and an array of big brands have lined up to use it. Microsoft and its TV ad platform Xandr will deliver the ads.

While Brahe said he was in no rush to build MixIn’s off-platform ad network, it made sense. “The pipes are all there. When you consider we've made the decision to go with the vendor of our choice. They have a programmatic platform. You've reported yourself that programmatic platform now sells ads on Netflix. Join the dots,” he said.

“Assuming we connect everything together, and we've obviously got a lot of our own internal strategies to go through to get to that point, but that's a pretty rich ecosystem for us to then be able to activate in… The important thing is brand suitability. I don't want to turn into a data vendor where I say, ‘here's my audience. Just use that wherever the hell you like’. What I want to be able to do is to say, 'I will curate a set of publishers and media sources that I think reflect the values of Dan's and BWS or Shorty’s or Langton’s or Jimmy Brings.”

Merch

Unlike Woolworths’ Cartology, which is a separate business under the Woolworths umbrella, MixIn is a division of the merchandising and trade function of Endeavour Group. Endeavour Group was carved off from Woolworths Group and listed separately in mid-2021, with Woolworths keeping a 14.6 per cent stake in the new company. MixIn is a lean operation so far – it has eight full-time employees at the moment, compared to Cartology’s more than 200 and a sizeable team at the recently launched Coles 360 division. Most conversations start through existing trade relationships, but end up heading elsewhere – often marketing, but not always.

“I don't know if sales is the natural (home) and I don't know if marketing is the natural home for what is essentially a sales team either,” Brahe said. “We don't need to have such an expansive team because a lot of what we're kind of putting together is self-service.”

A key product he wanted to push through MixIn was in-store tasting sessions, which give alcohol brands access to hard audience feedback. Coupled with screens and in-store audio, Brahe says it becomes a proper omnichannel experience for customers. “It’s funny that for all the pipes that you put together and attribution models and every kind of digital thing under the sun to measure sales,” Brahe said, “the one thing you missed out of all of those pipes is why someone bought it or why they didn't.”