Agency holding companies are jumping on the commerce bandwagon en masse.
It’s a shrewd move, given the sector’s runaway growth. Retail media, for instance, will grow 9.9% to $125.7 billion by this year and make up 15.4% of all ad revenue by 2028 – surpassing TV, according to GroupM’s June ad spend forecast.
IPG Mediabrands launched a retail media unit in July. Publicis has made multiple commerce-related acquisitions, including CitrusAd, Profitero and Corra. Omnicom has had its own in-house retail consultancy since 2019, and Dentsu debuted a “retail accelerator” called Dentsu Shop in February. Havas acquired ecommerce consultancy Expert Edge in 2022, two years after rolling out its ecommerce unit, Havas Market.
But what has WPP been working on?
In May, WPP-owned GroupM created GroupM Nexus Commerce to unify GroupM’s commerce functions under one umbrella, and it chose Samantha Bukowski to lead the new unit as global head of commerce.
GroupM Nexus Commerce “stitches together” the work of many internal experts, Bukowski said. For instance, Wunderman Thompson, WPP’s ecommerce consultancy, can build custom tech stacks, while its retail experience agency, Barrows, can integrate tech into in-store environments.
Consumers have always operated in a “nonlinear fashion,” Bukowski said, but it has taken a long time for the tech to catch up to human behavior. Now, it’s easier to anticipate where consumers are on their journeys and orchestrate the path to purchase.
That strong emphasis on performance is why commerce lives within GroupM Nexus, the agency’s performance marketing arm. The way Bukowski sees it, all media has become performance media, because everything is trackable.
“Commerce, at its core, is just a supercharged version of performance,” Bukowski said.
Bukowski spoke with AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: Why is commerce important to GroupM and WPP?
SAMANTHA BUKOWSKI: It’s the place where we prove our impact. Our clients want to see business results and measure them with certainty. They have sales targets, market share targets and margin targets. It’s our responsibility to bring that to the table through media.
How do you approach social commerce?
Social commerce is very locally nuanced. In some countries, we’re dealing with super apps, and in other countries, we’re just scratching the surface as people get comfortable transacting in a social environment. We’re still figuring out if consumers will adopt that behavior long term in certain countries.
We recognize social as the newest point of sale. Take TikTok Shop. We now have social companies that are physically holding inventory, so they’re morphing into a hybrid retailer.
What about retail media?
Retail media is massive for us, but it’s not just on-site or search – we’re past that. Retail media comes to life in connected television and digital out-of-home.
We have retail-specific specialists, but they still operate within integrated structures and sit alongside people whose job is to think about direct to consumer or how brand media impacts what’s going on in retail. We make sure that if you are responsible for running Amazon media, you know how Amazon makes money, and that if your ad campaign gets shut off [based] on net PPM [net pure profit margin, or how much profit Amazon makes on a product], you know how to course-correct it.
How do you use AI for commerce?
AI has always existed back of house. The shift we’re seeing now is going from a hidden capability to a consumer-facing application. We’re using AI to forecast the effectiveness of our media, allocate budgets, create multiple versions of creative extremely quickly and analyze creative to see what works before we even run it.
What do your own shopping habits look like?
On a personal level, I’m probably more online than I’ve ever been. Clothes were my hardest thing to buy online for a long time, but with the ease of returns and how much consumer convenience is built into that path, now I’m pretty much always an online marketplace girl.
In the role that I’m in, I feel like it’s my responsibility to try everything. I always test new technology, no matter how clunky.
Is there a commerce technology you’ve tried, loved and adopted?
Payment technologies. We’ve become accustomed to shopping and paying with a certain level of convenience. Apple Pay, Shopify sites, PayPal integrations and Buy with Amazon have transformed payments and the ease with which you can transact wherever you are.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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