In the rapidly changing digital landscape marked by the decline of third-party cookies and heightened consumer awareness about personal data, brands are recalibrating their strategies. The focus has shifted from "How to collect this data?" to "Can I collect this data?". This shift is steering the digital landscape away from dominant platforms like Google and Meta, and data aggregators, towards businesses with robust online presence and consented user data.
Within this evolving advertising context, retail media networks (RMNs) are proving to be a crucial asset for brands aiming to make a significant impact and for retailers looking to monetize their platforms effectively, and First-Party Data is the tip of the spear. Propelled by the surge in first-party data, RMNs are poised to transform into a $140 billion industry.
First-party data provides immediate insights into customer preferences and behaviors, enabling precise targeting, accurate measurement, and intelligent attribution. Brands can harness this data, directly or through RMN partners, to refine their advertising strategies, ensuring ads reach consumers actively seeking products, thus boosting the relevance and effectiveness of marketing efforts during their online shopping experiences and beyond.
Retail Media: Navigating the Post-Cookie Landscape
The rise of retail media is revolutionizing digital advertising, poised to claim a significant share of ad dollars. With its undeniable impact and anticipated growth, now is the time for brands and retailers to capitalize on the vast opportunities presented by this third major wave of digital advertising. Here are three strategic ways to leverage retail media in preparation for the cookieless era:
1. Expand Your Investment Approach
For Brands: Diversifying investments in retail media can lead to higher performance. Many brands, traditionally over-invested in 'walled gardens' where ad spend returns are diminishing, should consider reallocating their budgets. By targeting customers across multiple retail sites, brands can effectively broaden their reach and enhance engagement.
For Retailers: Retail Media has turned into a really competitive market. Keep expanding your infrastructure to offer brands a comprehensive ad product that gives them autonomy and power to grow, with self-service dashboards, real-time reporting, comprehensive billing features, and good attribution metrics. All this needs the help of a good ad provider that can help you scale your ad business, generating increasing value for your advertisers.
2. Test Tactics Across the Full Funnel
For Brands: To optimize branding and performance, it’s essential to deploy a dynamic retail media advertising strategy across the entire consumer journey. This includes raising brand awareness on the open web, engaging shoppers directly on retail sites, and converting sales with targeted tactics at the point of sale. Employing a variety of ad formats, such as video, dynamic displays, and sponsored products, can deepen consumer engagement.
For Retailers: Expanding advertising portfolios to support brands in achieving their broad marketing goals creates new consumer touchpoints. This could range from on-site and off-site display ads to innovative in-store promotions, leveraging rich media formats to captivate both potential and existing customers.
Learn how Topsort can help you build a full retail media funnel here.
3. Embrace Smart Partnerships
For Brands: Simplifying the complex landscape of retail media by partnering with demand aggregators and API partners can streamline media buying, expand access to ad inventory, and maintain efficiency. These partnerships can also provide crucial market insights, helping brands stay competitive.
For Retailers: Retailers should take full advantage of the expertise and capacity of experienced retail media partners. Backed by valuable insights into the market and the experience and learning gained from working with multiple retailers, these partners can help you scale your program for success. Lean on partners for guidance on how to build programs, optimize strategic planning, and develop growth tactics. Partners can also leverage their own data, analytical resources, and reporting to help retailers make the business case to decision makers for their retail media roadmap.
Seizing Retail Media’s Momentum
As we advance into a post-cookie world, the anticipation for new opportunities should drive brands and retailers to embrace change rather than cling to outdated methods. Moving away from third-party cookies will ultimately enrich the advertising ecosystem.
As we move into the new year, brands and retailers have much to anticipate in the post-cookie era, and they should seize the opportunities and excitement that come with change rather than clinging to the outdated status quo. Third-party cookies have served as a crutch for too long, and the industry will ultimately benefit from moving beyond them.
Topsort is delighted to be able to offer opportunities for the whole advertising ecosystem, offering different Ad Infrastructure to help marketplaces, retailers,brands and agencies ride this new era of advertising. Topsort specialize in AI for Auction tools and Infrastructure APIs to help brands tap into the same technology that made companies like Google and Amazon astronomical advertising profits for decades – all while remaining free third-party cookies and user-tracking. In other words, Big Tech’s Monetization Secrets are now in an easy to use API for you to build a profitable ad business. Found out more about Topsort here.
