It is the Big Daddy of the ecommerce world and sometimes seemed to have dominated the consumer sales channel even for big brands. But Amazon is a force that can be competed against if retailers come together and get smarter with their data.
That is according to one ad-tech chief hoping to leverage data scale to help replicate some of what Amazon does with retargeting and consumer recommendations on its own platform.
“To all these companies, we’re saying, ‘Look, you can still have the benefits of scale. You just need to participate in an ecosystem that does this for you’,” Criteo CEO Erich Eichmann says in this video interview with Beet.TV.
Eichmann reckons his company compares favourably with Jeff Bezos’ behemoth, despite the relative lack of consumer brand awareness.
“Today we see $550 billion in sales in our network of companies that we work with compare that to $300 billion in Amazon,” Eichmann claims.
Criteo’s best-known offering leverages consumer data to help retailers retarget online ads for previously-viewed products. But the company has since branched out.
As WSJ reported: “The Criteo Commerce Marketing Ecosystem, as it will be called, will give its clients the option to share anonymized, or ‘hashed’, aggregated data sets of customer email addresses or other customer relationship management (CRM) data, plus purchase and other ‘event’ information from their physical stores, websites and apps.”
Last month, Criteo announced a deal with LiveRamp to enable digital media buying powered partly by omni-channel consumer data.
“The world of online and offline are blurring,” Eichmann says. “Still, 90% plus of the commerce is happening offline. People forget that.
“If you take… data as a core asset and competitive area or dimension to operate in and the fact that offline is becoming online, we see a huge opportunity for companies that are not Amazon.”
