What is Commerce Media?

Great ideas are born from a need to fix something that isn’t working or to create something new where there is currently a void. This is the origin story for commerce media.

As a result of consumer calls for privacy, the digital advertising industry is undergoing a transformation. It’s a positive change that puts consumers in their rightful place at the center of the advertising ecosystem, but also a difficult one that has raised more questions than answers. Amidst all the talk about how responsible addressable advertising can work moving forward, commerce media has risen as a solution.

Commerce media gives marketers and media owners what they need (a safe and simple way to still drive growth through advertising). It gives consumers what they want (relevant ads, on their terms). And it keeps the open internet thriving (because that’s where discovery, innovation, and choice rule).

In short, commerce media is the next big thing—which means the time to get familiar with it is now. In this guide, learn exactly what commerce media is, why it’s trending, and how it solves the industry’s most pressing needs.

Definition

Commerce media is advertising that connects shoppers with products and services throughout the buying journey across both physical and digital touchpoints, linking advertising investment directly to transactions.

At its simplest, commerce media connects marketers and media owners to first-party data and to each other so that everyone can bring richer experiences to consumers while enabling closed-loop measurement.

To look at it another way, commerce media brings programmatic advertising and retail media together and widens the field to include non-retail businesses—all on the open internet where the control is in the hands of the marketers and the media owners.

Key Points

1. A first-party data-based solution: Provides access to a large set of privacy-safe first-party data that can be leveraged in a variety of ways.
2. Open: Connects marketers and media owners on the open internet, where control and transparency reign, and where discovery, innovation, and choice thrive.
3. Intelligent: Uses large-scale commerce data (purchase and intent data) that is applied via artificial intelligence (AI) built for commerce to:
   • Gain audience insights
   • Improve online targeting
   • Deliver relevant experiences
   • Connect online activity to online and in-person outcomes
4. Full-funnel: Engage audiences at all stages from discovery to consideration and conversion and throughout acquisition and retention, while driving measurable commerce outcomes at each stage.
5. For media owners, commerce media enriches their first-party data and inventory, packaging it for advertisers.
6. Audience-first: Enables marketers to create advertising strategies based on high-value audiences across all channels, devices, and formats.
7. More relevant: Large-scale data and AI improve ad relevancy, leading to better user experiences and performance.
8. Measurable: Connect every campaign to downstream online and in-store KPIs (such as sales, leads, and visits).
9. Addressable: Marketers and media owners can connect their first-party data to find matches and build, scale, and activate addressable audiences.

What’s Commerce Data?

Commerce data is a set of purchase and intent data that gives insight into consumer behaviors and journeys and can be used to deliver superior outcomes. It includes:

• Page and product views
• Products added to cart
• Products purchased (online and offline)
• Ad clicks
• Contextual data from publishers such as URLs, contextual categories, and keywords
• Product info like categories, SKUs, prices, descriptions
• Identifiers such as hashed emails, hashed phone numbers, and visitor IDs (such as random IDs stored in first-party cookies)

What Does Commerce Data Do for Marketers?

Every marketer and media owner already has commerce data from the interactions within their properties (what people looked at, what they bought). But a larger set of commerce data can provide a richer picture and show what else consumers are looking for across the open internet and offline. Examples include:

• Building audiences of people actively in-market for certain products.
• Knowing which products to recommend, with ad creative that gets the highest engagement.
• Measuring performance and optimizing campaigns in real-time.

What Does Commerce Data Do for Media Owners?

Commerce data and AI bring more revenue to media owners by helping them:

• Enrich their first-party data with additional insights for audience targeting options.
• Personalize valuable content for users, driving repeat visitors and revenue.

Why Isn’t it “Ecommerce Media”?

“Ecommerce” has become synonymous with online retail. But “commerce” is bigger than online retail and even retail generally. Commerce media is broader, including non-retail businesses like classifieds, travel, and finance.

Commerce Media, Retail Media, Performance and Brand Marketing: What’s the Difference?

Commerce media takes the retail media model and expands it. It includes a broad network of publishers across the open internet, in addition to retailers. It enables advertisers to use commerce data and AI effectively across multiple channels and formats to meet objectives.

Commerce Media Benefits

Criteo is utilizing first-party data to build an open marketplace for marketers and media owners, enabling a responsible approach to addressable media for the future. The Criteo Commerce Media Platform allows marketers and media owners to turn the world’s largest open commerce dataset into effective addressable advertising.