Digital commerce is disrupting budgets and team structures

Marketers in packaged goods companies will spend next year realigning budgets and teams as the worlds of marketing and digital commerce move closer, according to a new report from WARC. The Marketer’s Toolkit 2022 includes the ‘collision of brand and digital commerce’ as one of five major themes for next year.

Why it matters

Surveys from both the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and research company Gartner have found that digital commerce is a top priority for marketers in 2022. But the WFA study found not one of 52 global media leaders interviewed was “very satisfied” with their current capabilities in e-commerce.

Takeaways

• Digital commerce platforms are moving ‘up the funnel’. Having started out with search advertising capabilities they are now targeting marketers’ brand budgets.
• Amazon is the most aggressive in this space among the Western platforms. It is building a range of video properties (Prime Video, MGM, sports events and others), and is seeking to build new measurement offerings through the Amazon Marketing Cloud.
• The growing overlap between marketing and digital commerce budgets is leading to realignment of teams internally – though there is not yet one model. In the Marketer’s Toolkit Survey, 25% said they had implemented integrated teams.

Key quote

“The sooner we can think of these as an integrated strategy, and architect the path to purchase, the better we’ll be at both brand building and conversion, so it’s not an either/or for us” – Pam Forbus, chief marketing officer, Pernod Ricard North America.