Retail media spending is already booming, as new retailers light up ad inventory opportunities and brands clamour to get close to the point of purchase.
As the holiday season approaches, some in the industry are expecting the category to soar to even higher heights.
In this video interview with Beet.TV editorial director Lisa Granatstein, Jacquelyn Baker, CEO of Omnicom Commerce Group, says she is looking forward to seeing how it pans out.
Holiday Spending to Rise
As the holiday season approaches, Baker expects retail media spending to increase compared to last year.
“Especially the holiday season is so much around gifting and purchase that consumers are already far more predisposed to want to purchase things in that mindset when they’re looking online,” she says.
“I think the spends will go up and the placements will become more interesting.”
Advertiser Perceptions forecasts retail media to make up a fifth of US ad spending in 2024.
Retail Media Offers Relevancy at Scale
Baker says relevancy is what she finds most fascinating about retail media. “Retail media is really sort of relevancy meets reach, meets conversion, and that’s the ideal state,” she says. “You can find the right people and know what problem they’re trying to solve, give them what they need to solve that problem, and then close that loop immediately.”
For Baker, retail media allows brands to reach a highly relevant consumer base because they are actively looking to solve a problem in that category.
“You’re able to marry the past purchase data. And so you know who these people are, what they buy, what they buy in partner as bundles with other things when they shop so much more about them in this space,” she explains.
“And so you can serve up content that is hyper relevant to that audience.”
Relevancy Beats Personalization
But Baker believes this kind of relevancy is more impactful than personalization. While personalization aims for one-to-one relationships with consumers, Baker says that is not realistic at scale.
Looking ahead, she sees potential in opening up retail media to non-endemic advertisers as “the next big innovation”.
Some larger retail media networks are beginning to offer the ability to apply their shopper data to first-party data from non-endemic brands to create hyper-relevant targets beyond their own platforms.
“Really getting to this place where you’re using extremely rich data for brands that aren’t even available in the shopping environments of which that data was sourced, is a very interesting space to play in,” Baker says.
You’re watching “Why Relevance Rules in Ecommerce,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Rokt. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
