Retail media v walled gardens

Media agencies and marketers are warming to the insights, relevancy and safety of working with retailers as publishers, a new report maintains. 

Why it matters

With the cost of campaigns in walled gardens increasing 27% over the past year and expected to continue to increase over the next 12 months – largely due to audiences being harder to understand within these platforms – a growing number of marketers plan to invest more in first-party, data-led retail media, according to Criteo’s report, Future of Commerce – The Rise of Retail Media on The Open Web.

But agencies surveyed* by the adtech company note several hurdles to achieving this: as well as a lack of retail media knowledge (57%) among e-commerce sites, apps and other digital platforms, there is also low technology adoption (53%). Retailers need to update their advertising models or miss out on a golden opportunity.

Takeaways 

• Seventy-eight percent of marketers plan to invest more in retail media as a direct result of how they feel about advertising options offered by walled gardens.
• Media agency respondents already see this type of retail media investment returning greater impact in terms of relevance to the actual purchase (58%), sales growth (53%) and audience targeting (51%) when compared with walled garden environments. 
• More than two-thirds (68%) of marketers believe it to have the highest level of brand safety, surpassing apps (64%), social (65%), search (65%) and marketplaces (66%).
• Amazon (40%) still tops the media agency list of ‘most desirable’ online retail environments to display ads on, but retail competitors now follow very closely including Boots (30%), AO (26%) The Very Group (22%) and ASDA (18%).

BUT

• Walled gardens hold onto their place in the advertising ecosystem with marketers planning to invest an average of £303,000 this year. 

Key quote

“Advertising on retail sites is inherently a brand-safe environment with first-party data and strong performance – a combination guaranteed to secure recurrent spend from advertisers” – Sam Benkel, managing director, retail media Northern Europe at Criteo.

*Criteo surveyed 250 UK brand marketers and 250 decision makers in media agencies.

Sourced from Criteo [Image: Getty]