Owned digital products designate every digital platform whose code belongs to the brand. The terms “platforms” and “digital products” are often used interchangeably, but while the former can be mistaken for third-party channels like TikTok or IG, the latter is, in my opinion, a better name for a brand’s unique spaces. Marked by flexibility and potential for personalization, these digital products encompass everything from dotcoms to TV apps—and can serve whatever purpose brands deem necessary in meeting their goals and keeping with consumers’ desires.

Because there are no intermediaries, you can have full authority over the brand image that your digital products project. And that’s a big responsibility. What the brand experience looks and feels like on these platforms is how people will perceive your brand to be, so what should you prioritize when it comes to building your own digital products? 

Functionality, efficiency and innovation.

Back in the day, websites were unidirectional and served mostly as a source of information. Now, standards are higher. Whether we’re looking at content hubs or a smartwatch app, successful digital products must strike the right balance between functionality, efficiency and innovation. Consumers won’t stick around for websites that make it hard for them to find what they are looking for—or even worse, that don't fully work—but they will remain loyal to those that provide a seamless user experience.

That said, building functional websites from scratch is no easy feat. Because of this, many brands resort to auto-site builders—especially when it comes to ecommerce integrations. While this may temporarily fix the problem, website templates are not a permanent solution because it begs the question of whether consumers are going to be able to remember it. As they search for product options and scour through multiple tabs, will yours stand out among the rest?

Innovation is about creating the “wow” moments that will remain engraved in people’s minds, and adding interesting features that make a platform completely different from those of your competitors—even if your offering is similar. HP’s Possibility City, for example, is not just another ecommerce platform. Rather, it’s a showcase of HP’s digital printing presses that doubles as a hub to house sales events—from product presentations and webinars to one-on-one demos. And while visitors explore the brand’s lineup, the platform learns from their interests and provides them with tailored content recommendations.

Data and personalization: the next frontier of loyalty.

Provided that your platform is intuitive in its use and delightful in its appearance, the next step is to offer personalized features that make the experience truly unique. To get there, you need the data analytics infrastructure to provide valuable information about your consumers and a team of experts who can turn that into actionable insights.

I always work closely with the data team on both the company and the client side to improve our customer understanding. On one hand, a strong first-party data framework can help you identify how consumers are moving across the ecosystem—where they click, how they behave and where they find friction points. By designing around these general trends, you can deliver a more seamless experience for all.

On the other hand, individual data unlocks a new world of possibilities in terms of personalization. With Possibility City, for example, we included a virtual assistant that learns from visitor preferences—whether they’re looking for efficiency, sustainability, security or other priorities—and guides them through the brand’s offering. We also tied the platform into a CRM funnel that helps automate the closing of sales, keeping us informed of customer needs and how to improve efficiency. 

Designing around your business priority.

In addition to collaborating with data experts, my team and I work closely with the business consulting unit, as they can provide valuable insights into a brand’s digital roadmap and long-term business goals. Digital products should be built around this vision—not only to help brands achieve their goals quicker; also, to ensure their platforms are one-of-a-kind. 

In working with multiple airlines throughout my career, for example, I found that while some needs were universal, no two business models were ever alike. Options like “book a flight,” “check-in,” or “see my reservation” were common currency—but while certain brands simply wanted a functional app to help travelers organize their trips, others sought to raise the average ticket value by encouraging consumers to opt for upgrades, extra bags and other add-ons. The mere act of designing around these priorities made each platform totally different from the next. 

The bottom line is that digital products are as much the translation of your business as they are the embodiment of your brand identity. To get the most out of them, you need to understand your consumers and, above all, your own brand. In working with clients, my goal is to help them create differentiated products that drive their business forward, and it’s the brand’s values and identity that ultimately do the trick. By taking identifiable brand elements and combining them with functional, innovative and personalized digital products, we can create a truly memorable brand experience that forges deeper connections with your audience.

When it comes to the privacy arena, what trends are you seeing agnostically?

Privacy is one of the fastest changing and most complex realms in the digital space, even more so than Web3. On top of that, privacy is an ever-present undercurrent—ongoing in everything that we do. With a plethora of global and regional players involved—the tech sector, regulatory bodies, public opinion—we can safely say there’s a complex interaction at play, which makes coming up with any long-term prediction or silver bullet solution practically impossible. As a consequence, our waterways can quickly go from clear to muddy. What follows is a sense of fear, uncertainty and doubt among many companies. 

In working with companies across the board, we still see a lot of confusion around technical terminology, with partners raising questions such as, “What is personal data compared to Personally Identifiable Information (PII)?” To be frank, we believe this is in part driven by clickbait. Headlines propagating that “GA is illegal” cause unnecessary confusion and concern, when the fact of the matter is that Google’s GA4 as a product has gone through a massive rebuild from the ground up to address and tackle the issues in question. As a baseline trend, we’re receiving more and more questions about privacy matters with regards to all products in the digital marketing ecosystem—and we welcome them with open arms, because we’re here to help solve the riddle. 

How are you helping clients navigate this new, data-focused advertising landscape?

Our objective is to help our partners take proper control of and ownership over their data collection and activation. Therefore, we first focus on basic data hygiene, conducting health checks and audits. It’s very important to know what your company has in store, so we ask questions like what data is collected, which cookies are set, how is the collected data used, and who else is getting the data of your users? Creating a graph of 3P consumers and beyond is complex and thus requires high levels of scrutiny. 

Though the third-party cookie deprecation has been pushed back until at least late 2025, we don’t like to wait around and carry on in the same way we have always done. Rather, we’re embracing a first-class, first-party and privacy-first strategy, for instance by helping companies migrate to GA4—because we see no reasons for taking a reactive approach. We make sure our partners get on the front foot as fast and efficiently as possible, with a strong emphasis on automation. When you’re working with large data volumes, you can’t rely on human-centric processes to manage compliance. For instance, we have implemented automated machine learning as part of the data pipelines in order to prevent PII ingestion. There’s no way that a company can afford to manage a breach retrospectively or be proactive without automation—simply put, this is the most efficient way to scale. 

What are the main lessons that you have learned on this journey?

First of all, we clearly communicate to every brand we partner with to always aim for transparency, make a plan, and move beyond the minimum. Let’s be honest, the economic headwinds that we are all currently facing mean that every dollar, euro and pound spent needs to deliver a return more than ever before. As such, preserving data quality is our top priority. To give you the full scoop: everything we do to be more transparent, protect users’ privacy, and apply rigor and governance to data collection and activation is, in fact, enhancing the data quality, too. So long as you go about your data the right way, you can’t go wrong. 

Speaking of data quality, another key lesson that we have learned is to use time to the fullest. Yes, industry leaders like Google may unexpectedly push back plans, but rather than seeing this as an issue, we believe it can work to our advantage. Setting up the privacy tech for this tool is quick and easy—the hard part is changing the people and processes, which we know can take a while to get completely right. Though we expect that many brands will interpret this extension of GA360 as extra time to look around and perhaps jump ship to another technology, we believe that this is a risky strategy. Instead, we recommend our partners to take this change of plans as an opportunity to perfect, rather than a chance to pivot. There are no excuses to delay GA4 migration. It's imperative to use this time to manage change, translate data workloads, dashboards and data pipelines, and ensure all those GA360 assets become high quality GA4 assets.

Do you see gaps in performance between brands that invest in privacy and those who don’t?

There's a clear and definite advantage to taking a strong privacy-first approach to data—and companies are catching on. People are realizing (or, at least, starting to realize) that we’re not playing a zero-sum game and the exchange of data in return for personalization and better ad targeting is the data privacy transaction we all engage in—with reciprocity being the key word. Those who are best able to complete this transaction at scale will be rewarded with the best results, whereas those who continue to walk the third-party cookie path will fall behind. For some time now, we’ve been helping many of our partners run on a healthy diet of deterministic and probabilistic data and not trip over the mix of consented first-party and modeled data, and we can tell you: they are in good shape. 

Want to discuss next steps? Get in touch. 

Everything you do for privacy feeds back into your data quality, hence the opportunity to sharpen and perfect your process of migration to GA4 is one to take with both hands. It’s essential for brands to look beyond the obstacles of GA4 and work to get the best first-party data off the back of the migration.

We’re here to help make sense of changes in the privacy landscape, how to make use of GA4 data, and how such technologies can support all your marketing needs. If you have any questions with regards to GA4 migration, please reach out to growth@mediamonks.com. We’ll schedule some time to discuss any questions you may have and see how we can support your analytics needs.

Insights for this piece were contributed by Doug Hall, VP Data Services and Technology, EMEA; Julien Coquet, Director of Analytics, EMEA; Suzanne Jansen, Head of Data Strategy, EMEA; Véronique Franzen, Senior Director Business Consulting, EMEA; Jakub Otrząsek, VP Data, APAC; Sayf Sharif, VP Data, NAMER; Michael Neveu, Director of Data, NAMER; and Wenting Wang, Senior Director of Data & Analytics, UK.

When it comes to the reason why Google has chosen to deprecate third-party cookies to begin with, an increase in users’ demand for more control of their data is only the start.

Google must also comply with a long list of regulations surrounding privacy, the most notable being the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). These regulations ensure that there are certain standards for what constitutes valid consent when collecting personal data, as well as giving consumers more control over the personal information that businesses collect about them.

The phaseout of third-party cookies will support these legislations and ensure the success of the privacy-first era. From an overall perspective, the deprecation of third-party cookies will impact how campaigns are implemented and managed by brands and their partners. Previously, brands relied on third-party cookies to learn about a target audience and their online behaviors. Without this information, we can expect significant impacts on remarketing, frequency management, personalization, attribution and measurement. 

New ways to identify are on the horizon.

Third-party cookies facilitate cross-site audience identification, which essentially allows marketers to “follow” users across the web, collecting data about their interests and online behavior. Each of the tactics above rely on this form of cross-site audience identification, and without third-party cookies, marketers will be unable to access this information about their target market so easily. 

But that doesn’t mean marketers will no longer be able to conduct successful remarketing campaigns, control the amount of times a user views an ad, deliver highly personalized ads, or identify a user’s touchpoints along the customer journey—provided they prepare for the cookie-less future now and minimize its impacts on their digital media activities. 

Since the announcement of the deprecation of third-party cookies, Google has been working on a range of solutions to continue to show relevant content and ads. FLEDGE and Topics are two examples of current Privacy Sandbox solutions for showing relevant content to audiences.  

FLEDGE’s purpose is to serve remarketing and custom audience use cases, without using third-party cookies. It enables interest-group-based advertising by asking the browser to choose which ads users see based on the sites they’ve previously visited. To keep this data secure, the browser conducts an on-device action to select relevant ads. 

Topics is a proposal that enables interest-based advertising without tracking the sites a user visits. It provides topics that a user may currently be interested in, based on their recent browsing history. These topics can supplement contextual information to help select appropriate advertisements. 

However, trials for FLEDGE and Topics are still a work in progress and the solutions are continuously changing, so we must focus on what we can do now to be able to navigate in a world without third-party cookies. Don’t take a “wait-and-see” approach. Those who look to prepare now will increase their chances of success and advancement in the privacy-first era. Here are some strategies to help you on your way to post-cookie marketing success.

Prioritize and invest in a first-party data collection strategy.

To prepare for the deprecation of third-party cookies, marketers should focus on growing quality customer data that informs both strategy and tactics. Utilizing the data from customers who have shown interest in your brand is more reliable and powerful than buying and selling access to third-party data. 

First-party data gathered from your websites, apps, physical stores (including offline transaction data), or other places where customers interact with your business, are all examples of first-party data that you passively—but directly—collect from consumers. Earning this data relies on building a fair value exchange, so that consumer data is understood to contribute to a better experience. Customer trust is built on transparency, hence it's always important to explain how you’re going to collect and use the data in your cookie consent banner or consent management platform. When collecting data about your customers, you must also make certain that you are compliant with regulations such as the GDPR, ensuring you are getting valid consent when collecting personal data and not collecting personally identifiable information (PII). 

With first-party data, brands can evaluate local touch points and preferred paths, while customizing interactions for a superior customer experience. Now is an excellent time to look inward and begin to build the foundations of your data strategy—one that will power your marketing with clean, unified and actionable data. Collecting first-party data and linking it together allows you to have a persistent, cross-device recognition for a single view of your customer, and an overall understanding of your audience. Mondelēz, for example, understood that digital marketing is most effective when you know how to play to consumers’ personalized taste. After helping them along the road to clean data, we achieved a +70% global return on investment.

Focus on collecting information and data you have access to.

As a marketer, you have access to a plethora of data about your customers, whether it be purchase data, device information or email engagement. Having an identification-first approach to customer data will give you an upper-hand to targeting effectively without third-party cookies. With data from third-party cookies being cut off, the priority should lay with first and second-party data, audience partners such as walled gardens, prominent publishers and media platforms, retailers and strategic partners. 

After prioritizing your first-party data and collection strategy, you should focus on building experience with reputable, trustworthy second-party data partners. Second-party data is essentially someone else’s first party data that you purchase access to from partners like Google, Amazon, or large publishers. You should focus not only on historical data, but real-time behavioral data such as users’ devices, interactions with your website, their carts, purchase history, media consumption, as well as the categories and products they visited while browsing on your website. By leveraging second-party data from trustworthy partners, you will have more data transparency and access to more precise and niche audiences which are crucial after the deprecation of third-party cookies.

Conduct a measurement audit. 

Conducting a measurement audit will consist of analyzing everything you’re currently tracking and identifying if it is necessary to be measuring it. It will help you to identify potential gaps and develop a roadmap to achieve measurement excellence that drives business results in a world without third-party cookies. A measurement audit includes the evaluation of current measurement tools and systems, as well as the alignment of key goals to further develop the practice. When conducting the audit, you’ll want to identify the necessary data, reporting and analysis methodology to improve measuring marketing effectiveness going forward to help with planning and forecasting.

Key considerations when conducting the audit are to understand the need and whether you can drive more value from your analysis and analysis partners. You want to develop a robust framework that will be effective and efficient to leverage in your decision making. You also want to ensure the roadmap provides added value, and is adaptive and not difficult to implement. By conducting a measurement audit, you hope to identify opportunities for maximizing the value of your measurement, strengthening your analytic capabilities and performance, and understanding how to holistically link together different techniques for marketing effectiveness in a world without third-party cookies. 

Evaluate your ad tech stack and partnerships. 

It’s important for you to evaluate your ad tech stack and partnerships to identify technologies and practices at risk of deprecation in the near future. Having a strong, well-engineered ad tech stack will create seamless, relevant, and meaningful experiences for consumers and give you a deeper insight into those interactions. When evaluating your tech stack, you must analyze how much control you have over fee transparency, brand safety, streamlined operations, data ownership, targeting and ad serving. Your tech stack should also be able to enable current operations and be able to incorporate future ones. 

A partner risk assessment should be undertaken to evaluate how reliant partners are on non-compliant tactics, data and technology; what their new publisher and media partner offerings are, and opportunities beyond basic ad units. Those partners who rely on non-compliant tactics, data and technology should be making it clear what they are doing to prepare for the third-party cookie deprecation. Marketers should carefully consider their platform partners and ad tech stack and focus on those that can deliver results without third-party cookies.

Consider a dedicated testing budget. 

Marketers should allocate a dedicated testing budget for first-party data practices, audiences and strategies across thousands of variables. These areas should be tested and leveraged, becoming an integral part of the targeting strategy where successful. One way to do this is by  testing and targeting customer experiences to improve digital performance using optimization and personalization. You’ll want to design net new campaigns and tests running without cookies, leveraging experimental design. 

As the data agency of record for Molson-Coors, we’ve spent the last year helping the brand undergo a data transformation that ranges from data acquisition, data activation and optimization. With hands-on-keyboard talent and an in-house team, Molson-Coors is able to use that data to better understand creative and media performance, then make tweaks to drive long-term growth.

By testing audiences and strategies across thousands of variables to build detailed customer profiles and to increase ad performance, scaled experimentation is the best alternative to third-party cookies when it comes to personalized customer experiences, and the performance benefits have consistently been shown to outweigh the costs of investment. 

Don’t wait to get your digital house in order.

Third-party cookies have played an instrumental role in the immense growth in online advertising. Yet their often-intrusive nature is misaligned with current attitudes toward privacy and transparency—so moving beyond our reliance on cookies, while maybe painful in the short term, is a net positive in building stronger brand-consumer relationships. That said, we can expect more changes to data collection and privacy on both the platform and legislative level in the long term; the only thing that’s certain about privacy is that there will continue to be uncertainty. A privacy partner can help you navigate the always evolving world of data privacy with ease, and our Data Foundations offering is designed to help brands build data maturity to meet the demands of a new era, including increased privacy scrutiny.

In a broad sense, laying the foundation of a first-party data strategy will enable a clearer understanding of your audience. Meanwhile, new solutions on the horizon like Topics and FLEDGE will help brands mitigate risk and continue to deliver relevant content to their audiences. But marketers shouldn’t wait for tech giants to implement new solutions before they act. Those who build and enhance the core components and practices of a customer-centric marketing strategy will be better positioned for a world without third-party cookies and thrive in the privacy-first era.

For brands, a benefit of the move to digital was that wide swaths of consumers were now sharing their purchase intent—valuable data used to surface up precise results. Consumers expect relevance in the products and content that’s recommended to them, and this expectation will only grow; imagine having to search for what you’re looking for in the 8th page of Google Search results!

On the flip side, companies face increased ethical scrutiny in how they use customer data. Business strategies designed to covertly collect personal data and monetize it are myopic; they may have implications on the customer relationships in the long-term. It’s important that companies instead look at responsible, privacy-focused strategies to earn consumer trust, even more so as we move to a post-cookie future.

Privacy is the fulcrum to the future of marketing.

With many consumers increasingly becoming aware and wary of the use of their data, and with regulatory bodies coming forward with laws and legislations, now is the time for brands to give their audiences a seat at the negotiation table when it comes to their privacy. At the recent Google Marketing Live event for the Leadership Circle in Hyderabad, India, privacy was the key theme, including how it is the fulcrum to building the future of marketing. Some key interesting stats that were shared:

• 48% of people globally have stopped buying or using a service from a company due to privacy concerns.
• Four out of the top five countries that searched for online privacy (in English) were from APAC.
• Three out of five companies globally report benefits of deeper loyalty and improved agility and efficiency with being privacy mature. 

Essentially, modern brands use data to serve customers and provide a meaningful value exchange—more relevant, personalized experiences that enhance the brand-consumer relationship—rather than treat audiences as another product to auction off and sell. So while examples of data privacy misconduct often make the news, it’s instructive to acknowledge and learn from those who are handling data with utmost care. Walmart embraces privacy in the design of its organizational processes and structures, products and services by constantly monitoring the technological landscape for potential threats, for example. This way they are self-reliant on the collection and protection of data and hence subject to lesser data vulnerability. Likewise, brands can focus on privacy not as an inhibitor, but rather the key to unlocking better customer experiences through more ethical and sustainable use of data.

Focus on consent and value.

Given the fact that data security and management require a significant investment of resources by digitally mature companies, it’s important to use those tools to serve customers better, because that’s where the return on investment lies.

Two ways that brands create value is by offering transparency about data collection and control in how it is used. Ultimately it is about delivering value to end users. Consented first-party data and insights from privacy-safe technologies like Topics API provide incremental value to marketers while keeping online content and services free. Data-driven marketing focused on transparency and control can transform marketing strategies, enhance customer relationships, and yield useful content to people or even inform the product design.

A greater focus on first-party data is important because over reliance on third-party cookies, a tactic brands have taken for granted, is increasingly unwelcome by consumers and increasingly unsustainable given future plans to phase them out. Expanding beyond third-party cookies is key to building a long-term marketing strategy of the future.

Our work for Ace Hardware illustrates this philosophy. Through revamping its rewards program, Ace Hardware was able to improve the customer experience and deliver on its reputation of being “The Helpful Place” for those wanting to improve their homes. The app rewards customers for their loyalty while enriching Ace’s trove of first-party data. By unlocking insights into customer interest and intent—without the use of third-party cookies or targeted ads—the brand was able to deliver a meaningful value exchange in return for data.

Zero in on the data you need.

Another benefit of shielding consumer privacy is preventing data bloat by collecting only the data necessary to drive value for your marketing—not gobbling all your customers’ data. This enhances data hygiene, yields cleaner analytics and helps minimize risks posed by data breaches.

Software giant SAP estimates that nearly 73% of data collected by companies is never used. When data minimization efforts are put into practice, there are limited opportunities for collecting information, thereby condensing the depth of detail and timeframe in which data is possessed. This forms the nucleus of GDPR regulations, helps weed out the excess data and focus on obtaining only relevant information with focused questions and being intentional in data collection efforts.

Activate insights through continual testing.

When companies build a customer-learning and serving culture, they determine the purpose of data before asking for consent and a clear explanation is provided to customers on what they stand to gain in parting with their data.

With a focus on learning about and serving customers, brands are able to build a “test and learn” culture to inspire increasingly valuable experiences reinforced by data. Amex has been able to do this successfully with initiatives such as the small business lending program, which they piloted after having a deeper understanding of their customer data signals. Incidentally the brand also ranks high in customer privacy in the Fortune 500 companies list. Likewise, brands who are agile in responding to imminent privacy changes are breaking down the privacy era.

The right approach to data privacy can create a ripple effect of positive outcomes: deterring churn to competitors, strengthening perception, overcoming privacy obstacles and ultimately earning consumer trust. With these benefits in mind, keeping privacy the focus of your data strategy can do more than keep a brand agile amidst new regulations—it’s also a key component to future-proof growth.

Now, marketers can relive the excitement and ideas of the conference (or encounter them for the first time) in a new documentary. THE GAME features insights from speakers—including Vice President of Data Services and Technology (EMEA) Doug Hall and Senior Director of Analytics, EMEA Julien Coquet—to discuss how recent developments in data collection, activation and regulation are reshaping the strategies of brands and their partners.

For a clear understanding of where the industry is headed, find the documentary in full below. Look forward to more Superweek next year, running from January 30 to February 3 in Egerszalok, Hungary!

We might speculate as to other reasons why the deadline has changed, but we can be confident that—whether from a privacy or commercial perspective—the proposed solutions haven’t met expectations. This is actually encouraging because we should expect a 2024 solution that doesn’t compromise on privacy or commercial performance.

But what does this mean for digital marketing? What changes? How do we position ourselves with this delay? There are things we know and things we don’t, but we can prepare for both. And one thing is for certain, the worst possible tactic is doing nothing. 

Here’s what we do know:

• Marketing on Google owned and operated properties (Search, YouTube and Maps) remains unchanged given its use of first party, rather than third party cookies.
• Audience (re)targeting, measurement and attribution will change, but we don’t know when or how.
• Life goes on within walled gardens, but with an increased focus on the value of first-party data across industry leaders like Google, Meta, Amazon, LinkedIn and TikTok.
• Elsewhere in the industry, there’s an expectation that the adoption of so-called “solutions”—clean rooms, ID resolution, SaaS marketing clouds, contextual—will slow down.

We agree that increased first-party data focus is the best move for marketers and agencies. This is a gift that cements the foundation of fully consented first-party data as part of the overall data strategy. 

The postponement is not an excuse to just keep doing digital marketing as we’ve always done it.  That’s a “fat and happy” symptom and a one-way ticket to extinction. Indeed, any lost opportunity to explore and learn new avenues is a waste.  That’s not to say we need to spend this extra time trying to maintain the status quo. Embracing regulatory and tech change as a driver rather than a business impediment is a competitive advantage.  

Here’s a recap of the Death of the 3P cookie timeline:

• 2018: DoubleClick ID files redacted
• 2019: Privacy Sandbox is announced
• 2020: Third-party cookie deprecation announced (targeting 2022) 
• January 2021: Google commits to Privacy Sandbox and Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC)
• March 2021: Google announces that it will not allow “alternate identifiers”
• June 2021: Google announces Chrome will stop supporting 3P cookies by end of 2023
• July 2022: Google Chrome has delayed 3P Cookie deprecation to 2024

How many more delays do we face? It doesn’t matter.  We’re already in a precarious situation that common sense says we don’t leave untouched.

One of the most recognizable personalities in the digital analytics industry, Avinash Kaushik, said, “Most browsers have allowed you to block third-party cookies since the dawn of the internet. A cluster of people (like me) have taken advantage of that option.” (Chrome is the last of the most popular browsers to have no restrictions on third-party data storage like cookies). “So your current third-party cookie tracking based audience and measurement at the minimum already has a signal quality degradation built in,” Kaushik goes on to say.

These are the unignorable signals of change. More than ever, be prepared.

Retail media networks are when retailers establish an advertising platform on their own digital platforms—kind of like in-store advertising, but in digital format. This creates a new revenue stream for retailers by monetizing their first-party data through the launch of ad products. Though all of this is conceptually clear—every retailer wants to increase its revenues—the market is still reluctant to implement this solution. Retail companies either rely on selling their products and services rather than tapping into ad monetization, or they lack the right infrastructure and skills to build and run retail media networks. For most retailers, the latter is the issue. Some stick to what they know, whereas others outsource the work.

The Business.Monks—Media.Monks’ business consulting category—focus on uniting strategy with experimentation, value creation with performance, and consulting methodologies with agency crafting. Given the high potential, it’s time to start building your retail media network, here’s why.

5 reasons why retailers should set up their retail media network.

RMN provides a new and very profitable revenue stream. “We’re talking about a new revenue stream with a margin between 60-90%, so it’s huge,” says Cacau Lima, Business Consulting Manager for the Business.Monks in São Paulo. Just look at Amazon Ads—in 2021, it reached over $31b in revenue, which is nearly 5% of Amazon’s total revenue. Additionally, RMN has a huge impact on the bottom line, with Onsite Campaigns yielding up to 90% of EBITDA.  

Advertisers want clear-cut solutions. Digital marketing is all about measuring the impact in sales. Though brands can measure clicks and impressions, the bottom line impact has always been estimated. With RMN, however, advertisers have the ability to measure bottom line conversion and optimize their media spend based on the increase in sales.

This solution is growing really fast. Today, $1 in every $6 is spent on media networks, and in about two years, it is projected to represent 20% of all digital media spend, according to Insider Intelligence. Currently, 82% of CPGs have already invested in Amazon Ads, while only 39% has invested in the second biggest retailer. This shows us that there are huge opportunities to increase investments in RMN. 

It’s all about the data. Since third-party cookies have crumbled, RMN is the sweet treat that both retailers and advertisers need. Through ad monetization with RMN, retailers can gain new insights into their customers’ behavior and interests, elevate their first-party data strategy, and engage audiences by giving relevant recommendations that suit their needs. As for advertisers, they can access the retailer’s precious first-party data and gather important information. 

We’re in the era of Everywhere Commerce. As CX and brand experiences become ever bigger and better, it’s crucial for advertisers to have control over how to engage with their consumers in every digital touchpoint. RMN ultimately creates the space and opportunities for advertisers to do so. On top of that, this business solution is beneficial to retailers, advertisers and consumers alike. “Between brand awareness and conversion, there’s typically a messy middle. RMN creates a one-stop shop, allowing customers to find a brand, get to know its history, and then convert in one go,” says Galera. 

Translating skills into solutions.

“In order to solve complex problems, we need to be able to speak different languages—that of media, social, data, and so on. So, we’ve built a team that can speak all these languages by mixing experts from different professional fields, who together give shape to an unbelievable diversity of mindset and innovative thinking,” says Helena Curado, VP Business Consulting LATAM, Media.Monks. 

To secure future success in this space, businesses—both retailers and brands—need to adapt to the ever-changing landscapes of commerce and consumer behavior, and it’s best to do it sooner than later. Taking the leap can be scary, but just take a look at the numbers—they show it will be worth it.