It’s hard enough for brands to deal with the leviathan that is Amazon.com. It doesn’t get any easier when those brands also are dependent on many different retailers to sell their products.
Performance marketing technology provider Criteo, perhaps best known for its online consumer retargeting expertise, is leveraging its learning loop capabilities to assist not only brands but retailers and others as ecommerce grows ever-more competitive.
There will nearly two-dozen sessions devoted to the present and future of e-commerce marketing at the DMEXCO 2017 advertising and media trade show in Cologne, Germany on Sept. 13 and 14.
With the combined forces of Criteo and HookLogic, the latter acquired by Criteo in the past year, the company offers a performance model that has the ability to learn from what sells, Jonathan Opdyke, Criteo’s President of Brand Solutions, explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
“It’s one thing to just target a high-intending audience,” says Opdyke. “It’s another to be able to target that audience and actually understand which parts of it end up buying. And then use that to learn and buy the next part of the audience and know exactly how to buy in order to generate a sale.”
He cites as one example Hasbro, whose products are sold by a gamut of retailers, from Toys “R” US to Kohl’s, Target and Walmart. This makes it complicated for the toy marketer to figure exactly where and how to promote itself.
“They don’t have a single point of sale. They have many points of sale. So you have to treat that as basically one big giant ecommerce site that now Hasbro is promoting online,” Opdyke adds.
Criteo helps Hasbro and others by creating a learning model to drive sales based on picking the right media. The company’s new Commerce Marketing Ecosystem is designed to encourage retailers retailers, publishers and brands to pool their data in the hopes of getting new and existing customers to purchase their products outside the Amazon ecosystem, as The Wall Street Journal reports.
With Criteo Sponsored Products, an offering akin to Amazon Sponsored Products, the company offers brands native product ads that appear throughout the purchase path of retailer sites and apps. Shoppers who click on the ads stay within a participating retailer’s ecommerce environment to convert, while brands pay for each click.
Additionally, Criteo is working on a new format called Brand Spotlight, which Opdke describes as a new kind of brand placement built into retail websites.
Instead of a product-level auction, “It’s more of a brand-level auction for competition for a featured placement within the retailer,” says Opdyke. Designed as a value-add for brands and retailers, Brand Spotlight is done on a programmatic (as opposed to CPM-display type unit) pay-for-click auction approach “with full attribution.”
“Welcome to the Vibrant Future,” a video series of thought leadership from DMEXCO 2017 presented by Criteo. For more videos please visit this page.
