A growing variety of ecommerce sites are selling digital advertising, giving brands a chance to reach consumers as they research what they want to buy – and follow through with a purchase.
“This really started in the retail media side of things … Amazon and other big players. They had tons of digital consumers coming to their site,” Conor McKenna, director at investment bank LUMA Partners, said in this interview with Beet.TV’s Andy Plesser.
“It started with search and product advertising, which was very easy bottom-of-the-funnel stuff for them to do,” McKenna said, “and it’s been expanding upwards into more display and video advertising and actually moving off-site as well.”
This growth is supporting a network of businesses that help advertisers connect with consumers at every stage of the purchase funnel. Those companies include developers of software that help to manage and optimize commerce media campaigns.
“In our LUMAscape, we’re really trying to cover that whole gamut of the commerce media ecosystem,” McKenna said. “There’s a huge infrastructure underneath that is the data players that allow this to work, data clean rooms, CDPs, the analytics and attribution, and … the commerce platforms themselves that actually offer up the closed-loop attribution that is so powerful in this sector.”
Criteo’s Growth Opportunity
Ad-tech pioneer Criteo — whose chief executive, Megan Clarken, spoke at the LUMA Partners Digital Media Summit — is among the companies that are expanding into commerce media as an outgrowth of its digital ad retargeting business. It acquired one of the first retail media network technology players, HookLogic, in 2016.
“They have a growing and one of the larger retail media technology provider businesses,” McKenna said. “On the retail media side of things, they’re part of the engines that power some of the largest retailers that are moving into the space.”
Closed-Loop Environment
Commerce media advertising is somewhat similar to search and social advertising in that they all have rich datasets about consumers to help marketers with their audience targeting. Commerce media also can demonstrate how advertising drives transactions.
“They have the added benefit of closed-loop attribution,” McKenna said. “They actually see they purchased at the end and so they can tie back to customers — not a click-through to a site or intent — but actually the purchase of a good, and so that is a very powerful thing.”
You are watching “The Road to Cannes 2022 – Commerce: The New Cannes Conversation,” a Beet.TV Preview Series presented by Criteo. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
