Retail Media, or the placement of brand-funded ads on retailer sites and apps, has seen rapid growth over the past five years, as it solves key challenges for both retailers and brands.
Retailers need new revenue streams in order to continue to operate profitably and keep product costs low for shoppers. Brands need more relevant ways to reach shoppers at the point of sale, find the right audiences without relying on third-party cookies, and tie media spend to sales outcomes. Today, with shoppers flocking to ecommerce at unprecedented rates, Retail Media matters more than ever.
The Right Moment for the Right Technology
To make the most of this moment, retailers, brands, and agencies will need the right technology to power the open retail media ecosystem. Retailers need tools to efficiently manage all the campaigns they sell, as well as the ability to seamlessly integrate third-party demand—all while preserving the shopper experience. Likewise, brands and agencies need to streamline retail media execution across all of their major retailer partners, without getting bogged down navigating individual walled gardens and comparing apples-to-oranges metrics.
That’s why we’ve spent the past year reinventing our Retail Media Platform to give retailers, brands, and agencies the transparency, flexibility, and control they need to take their retail media programs to the next level.
Introducing Criteo Retail Media Platform
Beginning in Spring 2019, we set out to reinvent our technology to support the open retail media ecosystem of the future. After a year in development, the new Criteo Retail Media platform is here. So what does this mean?
Bringing more flexibility through one unified platform.
While sponsored products and display ads have traditionally coexisted in parallel universes, the future of Retail Media is one where retailers, brands, and agencies can address the entire shopper journey—from product discovery to loyalty—with one platform. By unifying our sponsored products and display platforms, retailers and brands can now utilize any ad format, targeting method, and media pricing model from one platform. Additionally, we’re introducing flexible attribution models and new data visualization and reporting capabilities to enable retailers and brands to measure campaigns on their own terms.
Putting retailers and brands in control.
For those looking for hands-on management on their retail media investments, we’ve completely retooled our platform for self-service at scale. Whether you’re a retailer looking to manage campaigns on behalf of your vendors or an agency looking to run retail media for multiple brands and dynamically optimize spend across retailers, you will benefit from a streamlined campaign workflow, powerful user management and permissioning functionality, and a robust set of manual and AI-driven optimization capabilities. And in the coming months, we’ll be making all of these capabilities available via a new set of campaign management and reporting APIs, enabling you to seamlessly integrate Retail Media Platform functionality into the tools you use today.
Making transparency the cornerstone of the retail media ecosystem.
We built our Retail Media Platform to be transparent by design. For brands and agencies, this means reporting at the individual retailer level—even when campaigns run across multiple retailers—and apples-to-apples metrics to compare performance across retailers. For retailers, this means full visibility into what campaigns are running on your sites and apps and total control over the price at which brands access your inventory. And for Criteo, this means opening up our pricing model to provide retailers and brands full transparency into what they pay for technology and what they pay for services.
Looking Ahead
This is just the beginning. In the coming months, we’ll be onboarding more retailer inventory, releasing new tools to improve the platform experience, and forging new partnerships to enhance this open ecosystem. We are committed to helping brands and retailers work together to raise the bar for retail media and look forward to sharing regular updates in the coming months.
