E-Retail Media: The Key to Success for Advertisers and Publishers in 2024

For several years now, the term retail media has been making its appearance in the advertising world. Touted as a minor revolution, it involves placing ads along the consumer’s buying journey. If you’d like to better understand its implications, or simply have a clear explanation of what retail media is, you’ve come to the right place.

The evolution of Retail Media

The origins of Retail Media

The 20th century saw the emergence of numerous techniques and tools designed to promote companies’ products and services. Particularly during the various economic booms of this period, brands had to find ways of countering new and growing competition. In part, this involved setting up point-of-sale advertising, also known as POP. This type of display marks the birth of retail media. 

The advent of E-Retail Media 

In the 2000s, with the development of the Internet and the advent of digital advertising, we saw the arrival of e-retail Media. This technique consists of placing advertisements on retailers’ e-commerce sites, always within the consumer’s purchasing path. Some companies are pioneers in this field, such as Rakuten in 2005, or digital giant Amazon, which has been developing its own advertising space on its Amazon advertising site since 2010.  

Technological acceleration and Post-Covid

The acceleration of technology at the turn of the century has enabled the rapid development of e-retail media. Coupled with the post-Covid period, which marks a major turning point for e-commerce, brands have been forced to focus on their digital transformation. Physical stores, well established in the French landscape, are developing their marketplaces like Maisons du monde in 2022 or more recently Castorama, in order to keep up with the trend. 

Data monetization

With an ever-increasing flow of products and brands, some e-commerce sites have become veritable navigation hubs for web users. This opens the door to the latest innovation in e-retail media: data monetization. There are two types of data: 

• Transactional data: amount of purchases, frequency of purchases, date of purchases, number of items purchased, amount of discounts, etc.
• Behavioral data: used to characterize an individual by observing his or her concrete actions, such as purchase history or website browsing habits.

We can also add more traditional declarative data (e.g. socio-demographic), available with the accelerating dematerialization of loyalty cards. 

Examples of monetization

A number of major retail groups have bet on this new market, setting up companies to monetize the data they collect. This is the case of the Mulliez Family Association (AFM), owner of supermarket chains such as Auchan, Boulanger Leroy Merlin and Decathlon, which in 2019 created the Valiuz entity. The latter is a technological alliance bringing together 19 AFM brands to collect, manage and monetize data. In total, it covers more than 50 million customers in 3,520 stores, for 1.7 billion omnichannel transactions.

The Mulliez Group’s example also applies to other major French groups, such as Fnac-Darty with Retail links, Orange with Orange Advertising and CDiscount with CDiscount Advertising. 

The advantages of E-Retail Media for advertisers

Advertisers can now take advantage of this valuable data to personalize their advertising campaigns. If you’re an advertiser who still doubts the usefulness of e-retail media, here are three points that should convince you: 

• Personalized, non-intrusive advertising: thanks to data, e-retail media enables highly personalized ads that are less intrusive, thus improving the user experience.
• Multi-objective leverage: while the main focus of e-retail media is to generate sales thanks to its ROI-driven approach, objectives such as awareness, loyalty and drive-to-store can also be addressed. 
• Granular targeting: the precision of the data collected enables targeting based on transactional, declarative and behavioral information.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that e-retail media, in addition to guaranteeing a brand-safe, premium environment, is also highly adaptable to the evolution towards a cookie-free world. Indeed, with the imminent disappearance of third-party cookies, this solution stands out as a viable option, since it relies on 1st party data. 

Conclusion

If you’re an advertiser, you’ll understand that this solution is not to be missed. Beyond the fact that this phenomenon is increasingly present in the French advertising landscape, the incremental value generated by e-retail media is substantial enough not to be overlooked. 

Are you interested in this subject? Take the plunge, as other advertisers have already done, and benefit from the advice of our teams as you set up your first e-retail media campaign. Contact our teams at sales.fr@kwanko.com.

If you are a publisher and have e-retail media solutions to exploit, let’s talk via publisher@kwanko.com