Don’t hate, integrate.
That could be the programmatic motto. And it’s definitely true today.
Because on Tuesday The Trade Desk announced that it will begin allowing mutual clients to use its DSP within the Pacvue or Skai platforms. That sounds like a mundane integration story, of which there are countless within the martech and ad tech ecosystem. But it actually represents an interesting and tentative first steps by The Trade Desk to allow its product to be used on other platforms and to place programmatic within the realms of search, social and retail media walled gardens.
The retail media renaissance, so to speak, has changed advertising in many ways. Most importantly, though, perhaps, is that it has collapsed many of the unspoken rules that have historically kept advertising at arm’s length from ad measurement.
For example, an ad measurement company like Nielsen that provides agnostic ratings for TV audiences and grocery-store-shelf market share doesn’t step into the role of an advertising intermediary. But that’s where things are going. And fast.
Just consider Nielsen’s CPG and retail industry spinoffs. NielsenIQ, a market research firm, launched NIQ Activate in 2022 to begin serving personalized ads and offers. Circana, the 400-pound gorilla of retail measurement, which acquired NCSolutions (the one-time Nielsen Catalina Solutions) last year, announced Liquid Activate this month. The product “can move swiftly from rich consumer understanding to precise audience activation,” said Cara Pratt, Circana’s president of retail media, in the release.
The examples go on. In January, SPINS, another retail market research and ratings provider, acquired MikMak, one of the big startups for shoppable ad units.
Even for The Trade Desk, the dynamic isn’t new. TTD doesn’t buy on walled gardens – no Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, etc.
But the Walmart Connect DSP, built on TTD pipes, can get you Snapchat or TikTok ads.
Retail media advertisers are preoccupied with “closing the loop” – in environments where the media is the data and the data is the sale. This creates a situation where third-party vendors must venture into types of services that would until recently have been verboten by some tacit, obscure rule.
When Amazon, Google, Meta and others unify measurement, ad serving and consumer purchase data under their roofs, they are showered with riches. So what good are these rules that prevent intermediaries from doing the same?
Part of vs. Partner
So far, retail media revenue has accrued mainly to giants like Amazon and Walmart that possess vast troves of purchase data and can apply said data to media placements that aren’t immediately shoppable or easily attributed to a sale. The vendors and smaller players must partner to assemble these pieces within one campaign.
“Data partnerships, on their face, can be super powerful,” TTD’s VP of retail data partnerships, Matt Fantazier, told AdExchanger. “But this takes it a step further with a unifying of the workflows [and] the measurement across the full funnel.”
With the Pacvue and Skai integrations, TTD still isn’t purchasing search or social walled garden ads itself, Fantazier emphasized. “But we are showing up alongside that inventory that they’re already buying.”
And, he said, that should make it easier for open web programmatic inventory to be evaluated by retail media buyers alongside search, social and other walled garden inventory.
In a way, The Trade Desk is acknowledging that smaller vendors like Skai and Pacvue might indeed have a more holistic view of the ad world, since TTD’s view of inventory is bounded by log files.
From a brand’s point of view, The Trade Desk is one channel, akin to Amazon, Google and large retailers they work with, said Skai Chief Business Officer Jeff Cohen. “It’s natural for us to bring The Trade Desk into the overall picture of what our customers are doing.”
Historically, advertisers logged into separate platforms to manage their walled-gardens-based search, social and retail campaigns on Pacvue and their open programmatic on The Trade Desk. Bringing the TTD DSP into the commerce ad tech startup as a native channel will mean open web media can be attributed on more even (and hopefully superior) terms compared to how advertisers judge the walled garden campaigns.
“What we’re trying to do is really unify the planning, activation and measurement within our clients’ [systems],” said Tommy Burton, Pacvue VP of global partnerships.
Retail media is also branching out into inherently less accountable media. Sponsored product display ads on grocery store websites or alongside search queries like “buy Dr Pepper” generate immediate, click-attributable sales. Programmatic audio, banner ads or CTV spots do not enjoy the easy attribution. But retailers can bring the same level of accountability by connecting the media to eventual sales in a more modeled-out way.
“I think you would agree, too, that we’re also just seeing retail media extend itself much more into the upper funnel because of the accountability that you get within the media itself,” Burton said.
But it’s not the media that’s accountable; it is the retail purchase data attribution being applied to the media which brings accountability.
Once upon a time, those things weren’t supposed to touch: the buying of media itself and the scoring of purchase-based results.
Now those two ends of the spectrum have bent all the way around into “the closed loop,” to form a linkage rather than a disconnect.
Independent or third-party vendors hoping to participate in the phenomenal growth of retail media must shelve their stodgy sense of propriety in pursuit of unified, attributable results. If they don’t, they will be smoked by giant companies that own all the pieces anyway and feel no compunction when it comes to grading their own homework or otherwise self-reporting fantastic performance.
“I see the future as integrated versus consolidated,” said Fantazier.
But, clearly, the future is not to be deliberately restricted based on old-timey rules and an outdated sense of propriety.
TTD needs “to make sure that things work together and advertisers have the data and the outcomes and all the tools at their fingertips,” Fantazier said. “We want people to be able to decision against more data and placements, ultimately.”
