Commerce media grows more dominant by the year
As the media and marketing industries grapple with economic worries that just won’t let up, instinctually marketers and agencies have turned to performance-driven options that deliver a quick and obvious return on investment.
Tie in that the pandemic put e-commerce into hyperdrive as people were stuck at home, and the result is an alignment of scenarios has led to the explosion of commerce media in the last two years.
And any media agency worth its salt at this point needs to have a competitive commerce offering. “It’s almost table stakes to almost any RFPs that we are putting out these days,” said one media agency executive.
Although alternatives like live shopping have their appeal, the bulk of growth in the commerce media world lies in retail media networks (RMNs), which have been sprouting up faster than mushrooms in a rainy forest. While the Walmarts and the Albertsons currently dominate the space with the size of their operations and the connections they’ve made to either media companies or fellow commerce media players, it seems every retailer that’s sitting on valuable first-party data is setting up its own RMN to harness this moment in time.
“Whatever the pace of e-commerce sales, advertising spending by packaged goods companies on retail media channels will most likely outpace e-commerce growth given the ongoing establishment of new media offerings from these retailers,” wrote media industry analyst Brian Wieser in February.
