Retail media advertising refers to brands’ advertising of their products and services at retailers’ offline and digital properties.
What is Retail Media Advertising in the Digital Era?
In brief, retail media advertising currently encompasses a separate niche in the digital ad industry, which implies running brands’ online ad campaigns within retailers’ websites/apps.
Key Benefits
From a publisher perspective, the rise of retail media advertising unlocks a source of incremental revenue (often a significant one, definitely worth counting with, while creating a budget), enabling them to monetize inventory with top-tier brands directly or programmatically, e.g. by integrating rich media units or opting for the more engaging outstream video ads into their digital properties.
Meanwhile, premium brands and agencies working with retail media Supply can get direct access to their target audiences, hence increasing their overall reach and customer engagement in a highly-relevant content environment.
Current State & Future Perspectives
Even though the concepts of retail media (also known as commerce media) and retail marketing aren’t new, it has undergone somewhat a rebirth, given a set of factors, including the recent e-commerce boom and the inevitable deprecation of third-party cookies in the years to come.
Namely, in 2022 the evolution of the online retail media niche accelerated enough to headstart a variety of retail media network businesses.
More importantly, as experts agree, this market segment will continue growing further on, since it provides advertisers’ access to verifiable, top-quality second-party data, which proves exceptionally important in view of the growing audience addressability concerns.
However, some analysts are still doubtful about the retail media ad scalability, given the importance of keeping people’s smooth online shopping experience the top publisher’s priority.
In addition, stepping into their new role as online media Supply providers, e-retailers will, obviously, need to handle extra operational tasks in order to ensure the proper integration of digital ads into their websites/apps, as well as the legitimate processing, use and disclosure of their customers’ Personal Data, in strict compliance all privacy laws and regulations.