Hey

The advertising world is turbulent.

Apple’s divorce from Facebook created a lot of trouble for small and medium businesses.

Many still can’t recover from what happened and nostalgically dream of the old days.

But, the world is changing.

We are heading towards a privacy focused, cookieless future – one with new players and opportunities.

And I want to share a new trend I discovered. One that just started and in a couple of years may soon become mainstream.

Retail Media Networks.

Big retail chains like Walmart, Target and even the big Marriott hotel chain have come to realize — or probably learned from Amazon — that they have gathered tons of precious data, and they can make the most of ads.

And this new trend allows marketers to purchase advertising space across all websites and apps owned by a retail business.

There are lots of amazing benefits to using Retail Media Networks as part of your brand’s advertising. These are my 2 favorite ones:

1. You reach customers when they’re ready to buy
2. You have access to more reliable first-party data

The first reason is perhaps the most important.

Think about it, when are you more likely to buy? When you’re browsing photos of your friends’ holidays on Instagram? Or when you’re on Target’s website looking for new pillowcases?

Retail Media Networks get your ads in front of buyers with their credit cards out, ready to purchase… and all they need to do is add your product to their shopping list (metaphorically).

And with third-party data becoming so contentious, Apple’s privacy changes, Facebook’s limitations, people using ad blockers, and GDPR requirements… it’s hard to accurately target groups of users.

But with Retail Media Networks, you can tap directly into the first-party data collected by these stores.

And who knows their customers better than the big store they’ve been shopping at for years?

Rather than your ad ending up on the page of someone looking at their friends’ holiday pics — I think I might need a holiday 😅

— you can place your pillow in front of someone looking at pillowcases, or your USB cable in front of someone looking at computer accessories.

How neat is that?!

This all allows brick and mortar stores to be in a unique position to offer closed-loop marketing in a way that other digital advertising networks now struggle to do.

And given the numbers of how quickly this new marketing channel is growing, retail media networks probably will be one of the biggest advertising trends of 2022.

Are you using Retail Media Networks yet? Which ones?

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