You could be forgiven for thinking that @LiveRamp’s annual @RampUp conference in San Francisco would be about all about data and data technology.
But it wasn’t really. Instead, retail media was center and front at this year’s @RampUp conference in San Francisco. Admittedly, they were that because they naturally come with better data, and in a situation where all other channels suffer signal loss from privacy measures introduced by either tech companies (@Apple, in the future @Google) or government entities (California, European Union etc.).
The low down: If you are a brand or an agency serving brands and you haven’t hopped on the retail media bandwagon yet – well, now is the time. Many of your competitors have made the move, and it will give them a competitive edge.
RM has hit the steep part of its growth curve. Because of their effectiveness, RM enjoy extremely rapid expansion in an industry bedeviled by tepid growth during the current economic crisis. Both retailers and buyers realize just how much better ROAS is on RM networks as opposed to many existing digital channels. So fast is the growth that RM networks have begun to displace the market shares even of the formerly considered to be invincible @Google and @Meta.
Historically, @Amazon garnered the vast majority of the RM market share, somewhere north of 70% in 2021. (Remember Amazon had the first ever RM network since 2012.) But with other retailers entering the space – @Walmart, @Macys, @Costco, @Lowes and dozens of others – and growing fast as well, now @Amazon’s RM market share is declining.
Panelists and speakers had answers to just about any question about RM, except one: what the heck is the difference between retail media and commerce media anyway? Forrester retail analyst Sucharita Kodali (@smulpuru) had it right: “Nobody knows, so for now we’ll just treat them as synonymous”).
#CTV was the other big subject at RampUp, where speakers highlighted one sea change in CTV: previously, almost all CTV streaming was subscription-based. But now that CTV giants Disney+ and Netflix have launched ad-funded streaming offers, following the example of smaller publishers, there is a flip where the majority of CTV will be ad funded – and tons of high-quality inventory will be available to buyers. Expect even more rapid growth for CTV ads going forward – more than $50 billion still sit in traditional TV advertising, almost all of which will either go digital video or CTV.
Interestingly, most of CTV ads are being traded via programmatic direct sales; PG is also the fastest growing sales channel. This speaks to CTV replacing linear TV as a brand advertising medium, only with many of the amenities of digital advertising. Also interestingly, this is a somewhat counter-intuitive insight given that there is a lot of talk about using CTV for direct response advertising.
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