Navigating Retail Media: the Top Seven Platforms to Drive Brand Demand

AMAZON (SPONSORED ADS)

Snapshot
Amazon Sponsored Ads stands out as a powerful service on the most popular platform, providing a range of products to engage consumers across the entire sales funnel. Operating on a pay-per-click model, it serves as a crucial tool for enhancing visibility and driving conversions.

Standout Features

• Diverse Advertising Options: Choose from a variety of flexible advertising formats like Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display; brands can tailor their advertising approach to fit various budgets and engage customers throughout the sales journey.
• Real-time Insights: Stay on top of campaigns with instant insights that provide visibility into campaign performance, allowing for quick adjustments for the best results. Monitor key indicators, identify trends, and quickly launch targeted strategies to stay ahead.

Challenges

• Fierce Competition: With rising advertising costs and an ever-increasing number of retailers on the platform, it becomes essential to develop a well-thought-out strategy to ensure your advertising budget is used efficiently and effectively.
• Buy Box Dynamics: The "Buy Now" button's algorithm prioritizes the lowest price, considering seller status, inventory, product condition, stock consistency, shipping times, and fulfillment options. This coveted space impacts ad visibility, and without it, ads become inactive.

AMAZON DEMAND SIDE PLATFORM - DSP (PAID PROGRAMMATIC)

Snapshot

The Amazon DSP allows sellers to programmatically buy display and video placements at scale and target audiences. Advertising is on Amazon.com, Fire TV Sticks, IMBd.com, Kindles, and Amazon Prime TV to name a few of the apps and platforms.

Standout Features

• Precision Targeting: The DSP enables advertisers to target consumers based on behaviors, demographics, and lifestyles. Create custom audiences to reach the right audience at the right time.

Challenges

• Higher Budget Requirement: Brands need a higher budget to effectively utilize the DSP, which can be challenging for brands just starting out in DSP advertising.
• Editing Limitations: The inability to edit active audiences necessitates the creation of duplicate audience segments each time new products are introduced.

WALMART CONNECT

Snapshot

It’s America’s largest retailer, and Walmart also offers advertisers a suite of potent tools, increasing product discoverability and conversion through its sizable reach and customer engagement.

Standout Features

• Multiple Advertising Options: Physical in-store consumer exposures, such as: advertisements on the televisions in the TV aisle and ads that play on self-checkout screens. The immediate visibility of these placements is beneficial.
• Unique Approach to Brand Pages: When a user clicks a product, that click sends them to the search term page instead of a dedicated brand page, offering a whole selection of products vs. a single product.

Challenges

• Restrictions On Auto Campaigns: There is no option to negate exact or phrase match keywords in auto campaigns, which can create obstacles with capturing irrelevant keyword phrases or exact matches.
• Minimum Bids: Minimum bid requirements for advertising can be an obstacle with limited budgets and smaller price point items, as you are not able to advertise for less than the minimum bid requirement.
• Minimum (Daily) Floor Budgets: Sponsored Product campaigns need at least a $50.00 budget to run daily, which can be challenging if you have limited budgets or have multiple products in different campaigns which can limit spending on a budget level.

CRITEO

Snapshot

Criteo is a digital advertising platform that allows businesses to effectively target and retarget potential customers through personalized audiences through keywords and category targeting.

Standout Qualities

• Personalized Ads: Criteo gathers historic data based on user interests and browsing history, generating more relevant and similar category products to consumers.
• Prioritized Focus on Retargeting: Retargeting efforts are focused on personalized, more relevant ads, increasing purchase opportunities.

Obstacles

• Limited Keywords: Advertisers are unable to use competitor keywords and are only allowed to use exact match keywords relevant to the product or brand. Limited to exact match keywords; unable to use competitor keywords.
• Minimum Bids: Minimum bid requirements for advertising can impact campaigns limited to budgets, and can also impact overall ROI return if the minimum bid and the price of the product do not generate the ROAS return goal.

TARGET ROUNDEL

Snapshot

Target Roundel offers more types of advertising placements compared to other retailers: standard display, high impact, homepage, native, audit, and in-stream and out-stream video. Roundel focuses on growing customer and brand relationships with its own internal data and insights.

Standout Qualities

• Self-Service Buying Tool: Target is introducing a self-service buying tool along with adding a few premium service buying tools.
• Target also offers two products to support brands looking for additional exposure through search ads across: Target.com, Target properties and Google, - Target Product Ads by Roundel™ and Search Ads by Roundel™.

Obstacles

• Exclusivity: Designed for Target, specifically; advertising features can’t be used unless products are advertised on Target platforms.

KROGER ADS

Snapshot

Create personalized ads with consumers who shop at the third largest grocery retailer. Kroger just launched its own ads Platform, KAP (Kroger Ads Platform); prior, the offering was through Microsoft’s Promote IQ.

Standout Qualities

New: Kroger Precision Marketing: Kroger has rolled out a newer platform within the last year, partnering with 84.51°, a retail data science, insights, and media company.

• Closed-loop Analysis: Post-campaign, Kroger will analyze exposure, participation, and sales from users to understand what worked, optimizing each campaign.
• Partnership: Partnership offers exclusive access to customer insights based on Kroger purchase data and 84.51° intelligence.

Obstacles

• Category Targeting: Campaigns are based on category targeting and presented on how Kroger decides to sort the SKU—brands can’t pick and choose what categories they want to advertise against.
• Starting Can Be Tricky: With new software platforms, there are always challenges with how to use the new tools and optimization levers while figuring out how to best scale campaigns with features and options.

INSTACART

Snapshot

Instacart Ads is an advertising platform that focuses on online grocery shopping ads and puts products in front of millions of high-intent consumers who are eager to discover and purchase them.

Standout Qualities

• Self-Service Brand Pages: Instacart brand pages are self-service, which stands out from competitors who do not offer this service. Advertisers are able to build marketing campaigns through the Instacart App or the Storefront pro-powered website.
• Market Share Data: Market Share Data can help understand the impacts of campaigns on a category share level.

Obstacles

• Automatic Addition of Keywords: This feature can have its benefits, but it can also add keywords that may not align with the relevance of an ad, and so it requires requires careful monitoring to ensure precision in targeting.
• Lack of Data Viewability: Instacart does not offer reporting on conversion data by stores or locations.

Choosing the right advertising platform—or combination of platforms—is like selecting a path through a dynamic landscape, each platform offering its own, unique terrain. Companies must evaluate the scenic advantages and potential roadblocks presented by each route. At Stella Rising, our award-winning team of retail media experts can help make those informed decisions—and then execute with efficiency, helping your brand soar.

Sources: Insider Intelligence 2024