Are you building a game, buying a project management system or getting an ad-server? Most RFP's lack focus to guide the team to the best potential solutions for their advertising program.
Request For Information (RFI) allows you to understand the capabilities of different solutions, without being tied to the specific timelines and limitations often faced during a Request for Proposal (RFP) process.
You can accelerate your RFP process significantly by ensuring that your RFI is focused on key advertising program asks; from formats, targeting, demand, to auction, machine learning topics to performance and service topics.
What are ingredients that make for a good Retail Media RFP:
- Share a strong view on your ideal advertising program, and how this sits within your business.
- Decide on where you want to own vs. extend an existing solution
- Create deep-dive questions on features specific to your ambitions
- Introduce a feedback cycle
When these ingredients are missing we see that teams struggle; solutions are excluded that need to be pulled in again later, the intent of the team is not well represented, and the team feels frustrated as they are not getting to the right level of detail.
It's a struggle that's part of the process, where endless cycles of spreadsheets drive the conversation. Advertising leadership (e.g. Head of Retail Media) and procurement can help drive an efficient RFI and eventually help accelerate the RFP process.
1. What is your advertising program ambition?
Every Retail Media journey deserves its own tailored solution.
We know that for each part of the journey there is a solution that fits best; where you may need a solution that helps you create a big leap - or may be looking for incremental steps with a specific feature set that extends your current offering.
Kevel often comes into the picture at each level, whether you're starting up your advertising revenue line or you're looking to expand a mature program. However to accurately provide RFI input, which caters to your situation you need to be clear on where you are:
- Do you have an existing setup, or looking to set out on a new path?
- Is your current setup fully integrated, or are you primarily getting outside or untargeted demand?
- To what extent are you getting sufficient demand from your own merchant and brand relationships?
- Which areas of your business do you need support to grow and develop your proposition (AdOps, Strategy, Implementation, Optimisation, etc.)?
- Are you looking to serve a single, or multiple offerings (e.g. sponsored product, display, sponsored brand, video)?
- Are you looking to allocate a significant amount (5>) developers to integration and extension of the ad-server?
- Are you looking to own certain parts of the ad-server scope yourself (e.g. relevancy algorithms, self-serve, billing, reporting)?
Providing solution providers who you engage with on the RFI with this context, is what makes the difference between a shallow response and a response that allows you to decide on the candidates for RFP.
Provide this context along-side the initial RFI ask, where possible provide a short 15-20 minute conversation with your Advertising leader to ensure the vision is understood by the solution provider.
2. What do you want to own vs. extend?
You will get the most out of an retail media platform if you are able to bring your own differentiating factor to the equation.
In each setup we see that teams are uniquely positioned to contribute something different; whether that's understanding of the advertiser (campaign options), understanding of the user-intent (e.g. search & discovery technology), understanding of internal systems (data lake, CDP, billing) or even your own supplier facing self-serve UI’s.
However often no team is equally capable of all of the domains that are needed to run a mature advertising program. Kevel is unique in that it provides deep functionality across all domains, but gives you the possibility to replace parts with your own and/or extend Kevel.
In the RFI being clear on where you are looking for support, where you are looking to extend and where you are looking to own - gives the solution provider guidance on how to answer.
This does not have to be the end-state, but it provides necessary context to the question. If you are at this stage unsure what direction you will take for a given feature, it's ideal to split up the 3 scenarios to ensure the solution provider gives adequate answers for each.
Providing a strong view, helps you set the right stage for an answer you can make a decision upon.
3. Deep-dive on specific features
The difference between an RFI spreadsheet (features, matching assessment, and comments) and an RFP spreadsheet is rapidly fading. As many RFI sheets changed from a dozen questions to 50-100 questions, often a large subset of the RFP questions.
Clear and specific on 20 key questions, gives you more clarity than being shallow on 100 topics.
Loading up your RFI with most if not all the questions also in your RFP, can help accelerate your eventual RFP process but it also takes away focus and depth from the questions you care about strongly.
We suggest focusing your RFI on the questions that are key for your advertising program and require additional elaboration to truly understand a solution providers ability. Alternatively the more common questions (ad-server industry standard) can be answered in RFI with binary (yes/no) and only requiring elaboration in RFP process.
We often see the following topics returning across RFI’s:
(Note: this is not an exhaustive list of Kevel functionality)
We often see many other topics pass in RFI’s (often generic, IT questions) that offer little differentiation in the RFI stages, topics such as Security, Sustainability, Data collection & consent, AI isolation, Compliance & Regulatory, Access control, Vulnerability management, Incident resolution and Sustainability - while important they do not typically guide to a decision on RFP candidates.
4. Introduce a RFI feedback cycle
RFI processes can often feel quite distant for both the solution provider and the team making the decision. For the team choosing a vendor, it usually comes down to reviewing a single spreadsheet or document, which limits their ability to really understand the strengths, trade offs, and thinking behind each response. At the same time, providers are left guessing what matters most, with little opportunity to clarify or expand on their answers.This can lead to decisions being made on incomplete or misunderstood information.
Introduce a simple feedback loop, such as a short virtual meeting or a structured questions and answers step, this can make a big difference. It allows both sides to clarify points and add context.
RFI’s are the start of a journey that can take 3-5 years, bringing in a new solution and transforming an advertising program. Following a few simple steps to improve your current approach, can help you setup an RFI process that leads informed and confident decisions.
5. Running an efficient RFP
Your team is getting excited, as the initial selection in the RFI has been made - and you’ve elected a select number of vendors to go to the RFP process. You expand the list of questions for vendors to respond to, and setup the various demo’s that are needed.
In this stage we see a few best-practices:
- Teams need to have a good picture of what their focus is, RFP’s sometimes become exploration cases for every possible business case - where what’s truly important to your advertising program gets lost.
- Teams need to pick and choose, not every requirement can be equally important. Require either weighting of requirements or fixed points to distribute amongst all the requirements (not shown to vendor), to learn whats most important for the team
- Teams have certain no-contest area’s, provide a limited the number of binary (must-have) per category and share this mark with vendors.
- Teams have to establish an initial mark with few details, require vendors to elaborate and require links to open documentation where possible.
- Teams need to plan appropriate time to do evaluations, this often comes at the cost of their primary job - plan appropriately and transparently, and help your team schedule time for the more time intensive tasks.
- Teams can handle up to 3 vendors max in this stage or evaluations become too labour intensive.
- Teams like to see the solution (demo) and get the opportunity to ask the vendor questions on a call (not just written) - often more is better here, most RFP’s are uniformed as questions can only pass by excel.
- Teams struggle to keep overview when an RFP has too many rounds, it often makes it hard for them to thoroughly question each vendor, we generally advise a maximum of 2 rounds.
We are seeing that most RFP’s take place over the course of maximum 2-3 months, any longer than this team attention fades and requirements keep expanding. We also found that most RFP’s have an over-run by typically at least 3-4 weeks due to legal input, commercial discussions, team members availability, desires to test end-to-end - an appropriate buffer (also to not stress the implementation timeline after) is often appreciated by the team.
Demo, Demo, Demo
Leverage time for demo’s, test instances, and even PoC’s to ensure your team has a good grip on what a vendor can offer. Vendors that put this behind a contract signature, often do not meet exact requirements or require long on-boarding periods. Teams are most confident, when well informed - the experience of using the ad-server is often best.
You are all set, to run an efficient RFI and RFP process!
