Retail Media Trends 2023

Author: Dominika Małecka | Retail Media & Amazon Team Leader

Off-site Ad Placements  

As retail media networks progress, they move beyond on-site advertising, like search ads, and utilize their data to tap into off-site opportunities. This new phase of retail media development encourages brands to reevaluate their media budgets, which have typically prioritized platforms like linear TV, Facebook, and YouTube, and consider incorporating upper-funnel digital ad formats. Now, brands are starting to leverage off-site digital ads, such as display or video ads, as a way to expand their brand reach, engage with new customers, and generate traffic for their online or physical stores.

Omnichannel Integration 

Retail media now encompass more than just e-commerce platforms, incorporating various touchpoints like physical stores, mobile apps, social media, and online marketplaces, as brands increasingly explore connecting digital ads to in-store sales.

To  comprehensively understand the return on ad spend, brands require access to omnichannel sales data, encompassing both online and offline transactions. To foster greater brand investment, Retail Media Networks must incorporate their offline sales data into the equation, enabling a holistic assessment of the impact of advertising efforts across multiple channels.

Privacy-centric solutions 

The ever-evolving digital landscape emphasizes the growing significance of privacy, resulting in the inevitable obsolescence of third-party cookies in the not-too-distant future. This development prompts the search for alternative online advertising strategies.

Within this context, Retail Media Networks emerge as invaluable sources of authenticated first-party data, enriched with profound demographic insights and comprehensive buyer behavior. This positions retail media as the future-proof preference for brands, offering a viable online alternative that performs exceptionally well in the present and ensures adaptability in the future without third-party cookies.

Data ‘Clean Rooms’ 

Data clean rooms offer a secure and privacy-focused solution by providing aggregated and anonymized user information to protect user privacy while equipping advertisers with non-personally identifiable data for targeted demographic campaigns and audience measurement. The pioneer in this field is Amazon, promoting its Amazon Marketing Cloud as an analytical solution helping brands understand how upper funnel and lower funnel activations work together to attract traffic and run sales.

Anticipate a rise in the utilization of those secure environments to merge retailer and brand data, facilitating the creation of targeted advertising audiences. Clean rooms will keep on providing brands with advanced capabilities to fine-tune campaigns by selectively including or excluding specific audiences, customer characteristics, or individual profiles, allowing for precise customization to cater to campaign-specific requirements.