Commerce Media

“Performance marketing and growth hacking ruined a generation of startups,” according to Rent the Runway co-founder and CEO Jennifer Hyman.

Amazon accounts for more than 40% of retail media’s multibillion-dollar total addressable market. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a big opportunity to scale retailer audiences across the open internet, says Criteo CEO Megan Clarken.

American retailers now see themselves as media companies. But in their publisher guise, retailers are in a strange and giddy situation.

Retail media networks overall still have a ways to go before they’re able to satisfy several basic buy-side demands, including better measurement, more transparency and some form of standardization.

The ad tech hits keep coming this earnings season. The latest is Criteo, which reported total revenue of $446.9 million in Q3 2022, down from $508.6 million last year, while net profit in Q3 dropped from $24.2 million in 2021 to $6.5 million.

What do Marriott, Lyft and Lowe’s have in common? All three are non-advertising companies that recently launched their own media platforms. Lowe’s rolled out its One Roof Media Network in October 2021; Marriott announced its travel media network in May; Lyft Media launched in August. Both Marriott and Lowe’s use Yahoo’s ad tech to support […]

Commerce and retail media suddenly became an incredible tailwind for online advertising. But anyone banking on retail media networks to power programmatic growth for years to come needs a reality check, writes AdExchanger Senior Editor James Hercher.

Yes, the headwinds are blowing for digital advertising. There’s signal loss, regulatory scrutiny, platform privacy changes and a looming recession, to name a few. But McKinsey Partner Emily Del Greco sees opportunity on the horizon for commerce media and new forms of measurement.

DTC brands are struggling to get by without the Facebook ad engine. Legacy brands are flummoxed by ecommerce. One company that’s hoping to split the difference is RoC Skincare, which spun out of Johnson & Johnson and was acquired by the private equity firm Gryphon in 2018.

There’s a disconnect between those ad buyers in the trenches of online advertising and their own corporate leaders up the C-suite, who are accustomed to determining marketing group budgets based on ROI and other basic advertising KPIs that, frankly, are going haywire right now. One way to deal with that disconnect is to add someone who speaks both languages, as it were.

Two years ago, shortly after the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Nike doubled down on what it refers to as its Consumer Direct Acceleration. Nike wasn’t simply weathering a storm, but taking COVID-19’s worldwide shakeup of consumer buying habits as an opportunity to rethink its business “by expanding our digital advantage, reshaping the marketplace of the future and creating deeper, more direct consumer relationships,” CFO Matthew Friend told investors.

Marriott is one among a platoon of non-advertising companies that have launched programmatic ad platforms lately. Just don’t call Marriott’s new platform a retail media network. “I wouldn’t put us in that category,” said Elizabeth Donovan, global director and head of ad revenue for the Marriott Media Network. “We are a travel media network and I think more like a publisher, too.”

Criteo is still using third-party cookies while it can. Why not? But “if tomorrow we don’t have access to them, then we’ll have to use something else,” said CEO Megan Clarken. What sort of “something else?” Criteo has been testing what it refers to as “more privacy-enabled, controllable and reliable signals.”

Walmart has The Trade Desk. Target’s Roundel uses Index Exchange as an SSP and taps Criteo and CitrusAds on the demand side. Quotient lost the grocery chain Albertson’s but signed exclusive contracts with AutoZone and Hy-Vee. CitrusAds picked up part of the Albertson’s ad tech business. The new varieties of retailer walled gardens are built on a foundation of open ad tech.

Consumer habits and changes among retailers themselves have reshaped the agency landscape around a new form of commerce media. The trend wasn’t as obvious a few years ago, when online retail media opportunity looked scattered with an emphasis on discounting: think cash-back apps and the heady days of Groupon sales, or CPGs on Amazon Fresh. Now, a brand that sells online faces a different landscape and an entirely different team of partners helping them.

Criteo is buying IPONWEB, the engineering company that built most of the underlying infrastructure for the ad tech ecosystem. The deal represents a huge chess move on the part of Criteo. So, what does Criteo get from acquiring the company responsible for building the foundation of programmatic advertising as it exists today?

Amazon doesn’t disclose advertising revenues in its quarterly earnings reports. It bundles the ad group into an “Other” category, which consists of advertising and analytics services. But even without a specific number, it’s clear that Amazon’s advertising business is both massive and growing fast. Amazon’s Other category earned more than $7.9 billion in Q2, up […]

Taboola has had a busy month. Three weeks after the company began trading on the Nasdaq, it acquired the commerce-based ad tech company Connexity for $800 million on Friday. Connexity is a logical and alluring takeover target. Taboola places recommendation boxes on publisher sites to connect visitors with advertisers and other publishers. Connexity is also […]

Dentsu-owned Merkle has acquired LiveArea, an experiential commerce agency, for $250 million, the companies said Tuesday. Merkle will add LiveArea’s 590 employees to its roster. LiveArea works with retailers and brands, though mostly retailers, on commerce and marketing. It provides design and creative strategy, but its primary offering integrates customer data with ecommerce tech such […]

The ecommerce marketplace management startup Whitebox launched an analytics product on Thursday that spans the world of ad tech and that of warehouse and delivery services. There is a boom crop of ecommerce tech companies that manage advertisements and product listings on Amazon and other online marketplaces (but mostly Amazon). Amazon ad agency Teikametrics acquired […]