First things first, what is digital retail media? It’s essentially ad space that brands can buy from an online retailer in order to promote their products, and you can find it in two different kinds of places.

First of all, you can find digital retail media onsite - on a retailer’s site - in the form of native, sponsored listings, traditional display formats like banner and skyscraper ads, and brand pages. These ads allow brands to connect with their target audience and win them over with their products at a very decisive moment - the point of purchase.

Digital retail media can also be found off site, across the open web and in walled gardens such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. This type of digital retail media uses a retailer’s first party data - that is, data collected from users directly while they’ve been shopping with them. It then uses this data to target them on other regularly visited sites, ideally, steering shoppers back to the retailer’s site or through their store doors!

So, now you know what digital retail media is, let’s find out where advertisers can buy this ad space. Essentially, any retailer with a transactional website that’s open to selling products from other brands can offer your business digital retail media opportunities. But, these opportunities are only available to brands that supply products to that specific retailer, and they can only promote the products that they sell on that retailer’s site. After all, it’s not in the interest of the retailer to drive shoppers away from their site and their products!

That being said, it still leaves many brands with opportunities across many different retailers and many different regions...

In Europe, ‘bricks and clicks’ supermarkets like Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Carrefour, and ‘pure play’ retailer sites like Ocado have sophisticated digital retail media offerings, but the biggest retail media network is, of course, Amazon. With over 300 million active user accounts worldwide, no other business comes close to this eCommerce giant’s scale and popularity. And, the amount of behavioral and transactional data Amazon has to inform the placement and nature of its digital retail media goes unparalleled.

In the US, Kroger and Target boast very healthy digital retail media networks, along with Walmart, which is second only to Amazon in terms of volume and revenue. Walmart is an enticing proposition for advertisers because it really focuses on providing a seamless, omnichannel approach across its app and its physical stores. This will allow advertisers to more accurately join the dots and attribute in-store sales to the digital media campaigns that started or encouraged those shoppers on their journey to make a purchase.

In Asia, retail giants like Alibaba and JD.com are the most prolific in the digital retail media space, but new players are also stepping in and bringing new opportunities involving ‘social commerce’, where shoppers are incentivised to encourage their network of friends and family on social media to engage with their favorite products and brands in order to gain additional discounts.

Digital Retail Media