How iFood built the world's fastest-growing retail media network | Sam James, iFood

Описание: Brazil is the fastest-growing retail media market in the world, and Sam James, VP of Ads at iFood, breaks down how the company turned an 80% share food delivery marketplace into what iFood describes as the world's fastest-growing retail media network.

James Avery, founder and CEO of Kevel, sits down live on stage with Sam James, former Chief Digital Officer at Carrefour Brazil and now VP of Ads at iFood, the country's largest food, grocery and pharmacy marketplace. They walk through the retail media maturity curve from seller ads to sponsored search to offsite, why iFood's acquisition of AI-native ad platform Advolve unlocked offsite budgets across Google, Meta and TikTok, and how a 50/50 co-bidding campaign with a major beer brand delivered an incrementality (iROAS) of 30. Sam also explains why Brazil's fragmented retail landscape, where the top 10 retailers hold just 19% of sales versus 52% in the US, positions iFood as an aggregator of consumer packaged goods (CPG) demand.

Topics: retail media in Brazil, building a retail media network, sponsored search advertising, offsite retail media, co-bidding campaigns, retail media measurement, agency rebates and incentives, AI in ad operations, product sampling as a media channel, in-store retail media

00:00 Why Brazil is the most projected retail media growth market in the world
02:00 What iFood is and why 80% market share matters
04:30 How fast retail media is really growing in Brazil
06:00 Why a fragmented retail market changes everything for advertisers
07:30 How iFood became an aggregator brands can reach in one place
09:00 The maturity curve from seller ads to sponsored search to offsite
11:00 Why iFood bought Advolve to win offsite budgets
13:00 What changes when a brand buys instead of a restaurant
15:00 Why 80% of Brazil's brand spend runs through agencies
18:30 The co-bidding model that drove a 30x incremental ROAS
21:00 How iFood solved the internal budget turf war
23:00 Why ROAS and iROAS still aren't enough for brand budgets
25:00 Reinventing product sampling with full-size SKUs
27:30 How iFood runs ad operations with 10,000+ AI agents
31:30 Why traditional grocers are making iFood their e-commerce engine
33:00 The untapped opportunity in in-store retail media

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