RRD introduces Iridio, a unified marketing solutions partner formed to streamline marketing execution and drive meaningful outcomes. Designed for today’s increasingly complex marketing environment, Iridio offers a flexible, composable service stack that scales from single-channel support to fully integrated campaigns. With 96% of CMOs often managing up to 20 fragmented vendors, Iridio solves complexity as a single solution for strategy, creative services, technology, data and analytics and media execution. “The modern CMO wears many hats — marketer, brand builder, technologist and data expert," said Andy Johnson, Senior Vice President and Head of Iridio. "They also juggle siloed agencies and vendors. Iridio cuts through the complexity and chaos, bringing together all the core elements under one unified team."

Despite the fact that the retail landscape continues to undergo massive waves of post-COVID evolution, there are many things that still haven’t changed — like the fact that consumers continue to go to physical stores to shop and that the physical portion of retailers' businesses still command the largest share of their revenues by a very large margin. Despite this, many retailers still only focus on the e-commerce sales impacts of their digital marketing, and ignore the in-store sales impacts because it's “difficult to measure.” This myopic focus is costing them — a lot. Web analytics tools or the measurements provided by the large platforms like Google and Meta have always relied on clicks to tell the story of campaign value. However, with major privacy changes in the market made by Apple and coming soon from Google, any measurement approach that relies on tracking individual consumers has been dying a death of a thousand cuts. Even measuring digital ads’ impact on e-commerce is getting a lot harder.

What’s that sound you hear? It’s marketers gritting their teeth as they’re being asked to give up their precious advertising dollars to help insulate their brands from the looming recession. Or you may have heard the marketers or agencies say “Let’s only focus on hardworking media,” which typically means lower-funnel, digital-only, highly targeted, easily measurable, promotional campaigns designed to boost short-term sales and eliminate “waste.” They’re all part of the marketer’s recession playbook. But should they be? In reality, we should all consider a different path forward: Now is an opportune timeto shore up brand awareness and loyalty by increasing media investments with brand-building, mass-reaching, highly creative advertising campaigns.