Microsoft Advertising is getting more serious about retail media.
Microsoft has had a retail advertising business since 2019 when it bought PromoteIQ, a retail data-sharing company for serving ads and coupons. But that technology focused on retailer-owned sites and media.
On Tuesday, Microsoft Advertising launched an off-site audience extension product and kicked off a testing phase for in-store activations.
“Our focus is on creating the most complete and holistic solution that we can from a retailer’s perspective,” said Kya Sainsbury-Carter, Microsoft Advertising’s VP of global partner and retail media sales.
The retail media category has become crowded with companies offering similar capabilities, but each with its own channels of supply and ways of targeting shoppers. Microsoft Advertising’s pitch centers on bringing the entire retail media supply chain under one roof, so that retailers and brands don’t need to work with so many other companies, Sainsbury-Carter said.
For example, there are a host of companies trying to establish in-store or digital OOH ad inventory opportunities in retail stores. But it’s a nascent space, she said, and the use cases depend on retailers installing hardware and screens to serve targeted discounts to shoppers in stores.
The key to success will be to have access to the total retail media offering, not just a selection of point solutions.
“[Retailers] don’t have to go find and have many different types of partners, different systems for their brands, different reporting systems,” Sainsbury-Carter said.
But Microsoft isn’t only aiming to help brands move away from needing multiple outside vendors. Microsoft is also consolidating its internal businesses.
For instance, retailers that tap the Microsoft Azure cloud have benefits in terms of advantageous rates and other cost efficiencies for using multiple services and data tools, according to Sainsbury-Carter. (Retailers are also a strong category for Azure, since those companies are loath to store their data with Amazon Web Services, for obvious reasons.)
And PromoteIQ has exclusive data integrations with LinkedIn, another monster Microsoft subsidiary.
But Microsoft is also thinking about the advertiser point of view, not just the retailer, said Sainsbury-Carter. Brands are attracted to the efficiency and measurability of retail media, but need more scale than what retailers can offer on their own sites.
The off-site extension product should increase the pool of targetable supply, she said. And Microsoft Advertising also announced an integration with Meta to extend retail media campaigns to lookalike audiences on Facebook and Instagram.
Just as with retailers, store-based product brands need a platform that brings together the unwieldy – and growing – network of retail advertising services into a “singular experience” with one reporting system, Sainsbury-Carter said.
“There are, of course, a lot of retail media programs out there,” she said. “To reach these audiences can be relatively complex, and we’re looking to simplify that.”
