Is Retail Media Ecommerce? NO! Also yes.

by Lee Elliott

This is a good question because it's a particularly tough one to answer. As always, let us Start With Strategy, as Ken and David implore.

You Didn't Cozy up To Walmart To Talk About Walmart.com

Formulating a real strategy means starting with goals and let's get real: the goal of partnering with a gigantic retailer, Amazon aside, is absolutely NOT to drive ecommerce sales in 95% of cases.

The reason you partner with a major retailer is for all that beautiful, beautiful retail square footage positioned at perfect points of customer convenience all across the land.

This creates a very strange tenson when you arrive at the point in your retailer relationship journey where you're considering buying retail media in support of your products. In 2023, most retail media, and especially the points at which you are likely to dip your toe in, are very much digital and online.

All the ads are online, the point of the whole thing is offline, what are you to do?

Let's take a beat and come back to how we accomplish what we want to accomplish later and just rule some retail media out of the e-commerce space.

That Which Is Definitely Not E-Commerce

Everything in store can pretty safely be ruled out of the e-commerce realm. In store TV, in store digital displays, any kind of media in any way meant to meet the customer within or very near to the store, is not e-commerce.

Online But Offline

There's also a wide variety of digital formats where the comprehensive strategy might actually be to use said digital formats, to drive offline sales. Just because an ad is online doesn't mean that it only drives online results.

Much of the first wave of retail media, outside Amazon, came from stores that didn't yet even have much of an e-commerce operation, and so these plans and campaigns featured a whole lot of 100% online media that was aimed at driving offline results.

Sounds crazy, right?

Well, if you think that's crazy, you may want to read our major case study that we'll be releasing very soon.

Okay, What Is DEFINITELY E-Commerce, Though?

Please, just tell me that my Criteo campaigns are e-commerce so I can simply my dang budget!

Yes, many of the new digital ad formats, especially the biddable and self-service friendly offerings out there, could definitely be considered e-commerce.

If you need to put your retail media paid search and display and online video under the e-commerce heading, go ahead.

What we would advise you to do is to consider the potential offline impact of these placements much more than you would for e-commerce advertising formats outside of retail media. Believe it or not, a paid search ad on Target.com, which is attached to a massive physical world retail chain, might have more of an impact on in-store shopping than a paid search ad on Google.com

So What's The Answer In A Nutshell?

The ad formats that you would consider e-commerce anywhere else, can be considered e-commerce on retail media. Paid search ads, digital display, digital video, and all the rest of that is as much fundamentally an e-commerce ad for retail media as it is for anything else.

However, this e-commerce media tends to have a larger impact outside of e-commerce than it does not non-retail media.

There are also retail media formats and/or messaging strategies that are very much NOT e-commerce, and you should give these equal consideration when planning if you intend to increase sales in retail stores.