From Instacart to Uber, a wide variety of digital businesses are realizing that they can spin up advertising businesses.
Their inspiration? Amazon’s “other” revenue category. Composed mostly of advertising revenue, it’s proven to a slew of digital companies that they can gain profitability by pursuing the sky-high margins in advertising.
On this week’s Big Story, we talk about why such a wide variety of companies – including “buy now, pay later” companies like Affirm – are spinning up ad businesses now, and what’s in it for marketers. We also discuss the evolving nature of retail media.
There’s another thing many of these companies have in common, too: closed-loop attribution, since they’re oh so close to a consumer’s grocery store checkout, for example.
Also in this week’s episode: Roku and Shopify paired up to give smaller, direct-to-consumer brands access to connected TV inventory. The connection is one of many TV ad sellers are forging with SMBs.
Just like Amazon’s advertising success spurred a wave of companies with ancillary ads businesses, the Roku-Shopify partnership is inspired by the walled gardens. Facebook and Google, of course, earn most of their revenue not from the top 100 advertisers, but from their millions of smaller advertisers.
