What exactly is retail media?

Essentially, retail media is when brands advertise on sites and apps within a marketplace. A great example of retail media is the tremendously successful platform, Amazon Advertising. Amazon’s natively built advertising platform offers many advantages to brands to reach its audience, and has proven to be a rather lucrative investment for Amazon itself.

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Given its booming popularity and importance, you probably have read a fair bit about retail media, or at the very least heard its mention a fair few times. While the scope of retail media continues to expand, it is essentially advertising that is sold on digital inventories contained within platforms where products are sold, or on external digital inventories connected to such platforms. While primarily such ‘digital inventories’ refer to online advertising real estate such as website banners and sponsored search results, they also include a growing number of offsite inventories that exist in the digital as well as physical space. These can be display ads on smart TVs, end cap screens in physical stores, or video ads on popular streaming platforms.

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Types of retail media inventories:

Sponsored search results

Website display or banner ads

Smart or interactive web-widgets

Offsite ad inventories

Physical screens in stores

Digital out of home inventories

Inventories on CTVs & personal devices

Ad inventories on OTT services

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Why retailers need to take retail media more seriously

Retail media platform creates incremental revenue streams for retailers, by activating existing inventories and simplifying access to them for brands. AI-powered retail tech platforms like Monetize automate the advertising process which reduces the bandwidth and makes it cost-effective and easy for brands.

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Statista estimated that by 2024, global retail media spending will cross $140 billion, doubling from $77 billion (2021) in just three years. It is the perfect opportunity for retailers to tap into this surger in advertiser spending, and build valuable retail media networks for them to invest in.

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Reasons behind retail media’s rapid growth

With the rapid expansion of e-commerce and the death of third-party cookies, ad management and getting in-depth data were the biggest challenges faced by the industry, and retail media is the solution to those challenges. Recently it has expanded into offline stores and public environments with connected in-store displays and digital out-of-home advertising. Engaging and re-engaging with shoppers who still prefer offline stores became a challenge for advertisers, even if the number of online grocery shoppers has increased. Consisting of engaging billboards and signages, digital out-of-home advertising is the key to that.

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What to look for while choosing a retail media platform?

There are many things that retailers should consider before investing in a retail media platform. However, these are the top features a good retail media platform should have for any business:

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AI-powered:

An AI-powered retail media platform automates campaign launches, budget setting, as well as generation of ad creatives, which eliminates manual labor and makes ad management easy.

Convenience is key:

Self-serve makes it easier for brands to post ads on their app or site, which makes launching a campaign a whole lot simpler.

Organized and well managed:

Platforms that offer an organized calendar and provide an organized dashboard for sellers to see which inventory is available for which date will be very beneficial for both the marketplace as well as the brand, as they both will be aware of which ad will be live when. The dashboard should also represent other details like ROIs, ad impressions, etc.

Campaign options:

An effective retail media platform will provide you with multiple campaign options, like sponsored product ads, sponsored display ads, rich media ads, offsite ads, gamified ads, and awareness ads. etc. With these advertising options, the brands can effectively increase their sales.

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Talk to an expert to know more about what retail media platforms have to offer. Contact us now.