Commerce Media:
The Dawn of A New Era in Performance Media

Brands are starting to use commerce media for upper-mid to upper funnel campaigns. But they’re utilizing the marketing channel in a different way than performance marketers do.

The definition of first-party data implies that whoever is using the data in question has a direct relationship with the consumer. In the case of retail media, this entails that retailers have gotten consent or permission from the consumer to use their data for promotional purposes such as marketing.

With commerce media, you have access to a wealth of product-purchase data that is generating new types of audience segments. Since retail media advertising is 50% more effective than Social at generating a user response, it’s safe to assume that even early audience segmentation has been successful.

Back in July, Google made the sudden surprising decision to go back on its plans to remove the third-party cookie from its Chrome browser. Given that Google had been planning and postponing this deprecation for several years, marketers had mixed feelings with many expressing frustration by the reversal.

Marketing is commonly broken down into two groups: brand and performance. Where brand marketing is about upper-funnel advertising, performance is where you spend money to drive sales.

The idea of connecting online commerce media to in-store ad space and being able to understand the impact on each other almost seems like science fiction. Can what happens online really translate to ad inventory in the physical world?

Onsite retail media has been revolutionary in its ability to get brands closer to the point of purchase. But it has also been somewhat limited in execution. Much of onsite retail media has focused on placing ads as sponsored search results.

The main benefit of onsite retail media is that it gets brands very close to the point of purchase in a straightforward way. When a customer is searching for something on a retailer’s website, they’re reliably in purchase mode.

When retail media comes up in discussion, most of us think about retail websites or apps. This is what we now refer to as onsite retail media. Users visit an e-commerce website or platform and advertisers place ads close to the point of purchase.

In the previous blog, we explained that retail media is most commonly ad placements on a retailer’s owned assets—such as their website or app—that take advantage of the retailer’s First-Party Data.

It’s not an exaggeration to suggest that retail media is creating the biggest shift in digital advertising since programmatic became a thing...