‘All I think about is retail media’: SMG’s Sam Knights and the billion-pound opportunity

SMG is comprised of three arms: its agency Threefold, which builds and operates retail media networks on behalf of retailers; its commerce marketing tech arm, Plan-Apps; and its brand-facing business, Capture.

With that combination, SMG has won retailer clients including Co-op, Boots, Deliveroo, Morrisons and, most recently, Asda. On the brand side, its partner list spans the likes of General Mills, McCain, BrewDog and Taylors of Harrogate.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I think we’d be at 400 people and going to Cannes Lions with everybody talking about retail media,” says SMG CEO Sam Knights, sitting at its London HQ. “That was just so far off what we thought would happen. Every time we win a big piece of business, it’s always a bit of a moment of: ‘Oh my God, how have we got here?’”

Founded in 2008 as Capture by Matt Lee and Joel Hopwood, Knights joined in 2012 from P&G, where he’d experienced first hand the challenges of communicating effectively with shoppers.

“At Gillette we’d spend a huge amount of money on marketing – at the top of the funnel, a lot of TV, outdoor, with the aim to drive awareness, which would lead to conversion in store,” Knights says. “But the efficiency of that model was declining steeply. We weren’t sending fewer people into store, but we were converting less.”

Gillette wanted to invest more in marketing on the shelves. So Knights was armed with a big budget that he could spend around the European retailers. At that point, the full scale of the problem emerged.

“Every retailer would say they’d love to take the money, but only two could plan a campaign, work with you in a good way to execute it and give you the data to show it’s worked.” With practically “nobody connecting those dots”, an opportunity became apparent.

So the early iteration of SMG was formed. One of its initial clients was Very Group, which was ditching its physical catalogues and needed a new way to secure brand investment. A few years later, SMG secured a partnership with Co-op. “That was really the making of us,” Knights says. “A big omnichannel retailer that everyone knew. And it all grew from there.”

Today, SMG works with an ever-increasing list of retailers to offer a full media agency experience. For too long, the space had “felt like sales” Knights says.

“It was a team of salespeople that would go out to the brands and say: ‘Do you want an email? Can I flog you a space on the website?’ We wanted to come at it from a pure marketing point of view. We asked: Who are you trying to reach? What are you trying to say to them right now? Let’s look at all the touch points we can use to do that. And then let’s look at real measurement behind it. Nobody else was doing it that way.

“We drilled it into our team that every campaign had to be right for the brand, the retailer had to love it and it had to be brilliant for the customer,” he says.

The strategy is working. Clients continue to come on board, and the company is expanding into the US.

It’s certainly a long way from how Knights had originally imagined his career would go. “When I was a kid, I really wanted to be a fighter jet pilot,” he says. “That was my ambition in life. I learned to fly when I was really young. I could fly a plane before I could drive.”

But just before going to university on an RAF scholarship, Knights got the heartbreaking diagnosis that he was colourblind, dashing his dream. “Existential crisis at 18,” he recalls. “What am I going to do?”

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He got a job on the press line for Guinness World Records. Journalists would call with enquiries along the lines of: “This guy in Leicester has grown a massive potato – is it the biggest potato in the world?”

Soon, Knights became an adjudicator – officiating record attempts for the world’s biggest Easter Egg Hunt, fastest pogo stick up the Empire State Building and most tattooed person, to name but a few.

“I used to travel around the world and meet the strangest people,” he says. He recalls a night out “in Soho with the guy with the stretchiest skin, the lady with the longest nails and Xishun, the tallest guy”.

Each Friday, Knights and his colleagues would make up records and set them for other people to beat. His longest-held record is for building the tallest stack of Polo mints.

It was an enjoyable start to his career. But for Knights, his proudest achievement – and biggest challenge – has been at SMG. Yes, it is in a prime position given the rise of retail media. It’s not a guaranteed success, though: after all, retailer partners decide to end the relationship and bring the work in house.

“Like any business, you’ve got to keep doing really good work,” Knights says. “Otherwise, the question of: ‘Could we just do this ourselves?’ becomes more prominent. But, they’re retailers, they’ve got lots to think about. All I think about every day is retail media.”

Plus, there is the constant flurry of new tech and new approaches in the space. “We’re always trying to innovate,” Knights notes. “What I didn’t appreciate when I came into this is how much you’re tested mentally all the time. It’s a real sport, you spend all day having to think clearly and by the end of the day you’re totally shattered just because of the energy it takes.

“You’ve got to try and use different areas of your brain. In a similar way as being a fighter jet pilot, it’s a massive mental challenge.”