Wen Zhe Lim is Director of Advertising & Partnerships at foodpanda
The shift towards a cookieless world is underway, with Google phasing out third-party cookies starting last quarter. Despite this, 75% of marketers still rely on third-party cookies in their marketing strategies, while fewer than 50% feel adequately prepared for this impending change.
In light of this, first-party data becomes a crucial asset. To unlock its value, marketers should explore and leverage new channels that facilitate the collection of first-party data – such as retail media.
Retail media: It’s easier than you think
While retail media might be unfamiliar to some marketers as it’s a relatively new form of advertising, getting started is simple.
Marketers can unleash its potential by partnering with retail media networks, such as foodpanda, to tap into robust first-party data generated through customer interactions and transactions. This data can be fed into programmatic advertising platforms to offer key insights into customers’ shopping habits, preferences, and purchasing patterns. An example of this is foodpanda’s recent partnership with The Trade Desk, which enables brands to reach foodpanda customers on the open internet via The Trade Desk’s platform across channels such as OTT, mobile apps, and websites. Through the collaboration, brands can create highly targeted and personalised advertising campaigns to engage customers, in turn boosting their performance objectives.
Contrary to common belief, retail media serves both endemic and non-endemic brands. While endemic brands align their campaigns more closely with consumer intent, non-endemic brands can leverage retail media advertising to increase brand awareness and engage highly-relevant audiences and potential customers, even if their products aren’t directly sold there, by redirecting traffic to their websites.
Optimising ad spends with retail media
Retail media is gaining popularity as a preferred advertising platform, with retail media spend projected to increase 8.3% this year. A key reason is because it offers detailed transactional data and goes beyond purchase intent. This empowers marketers to create advanced audience segments, delivering targeted ads to customers that align closer to their preferences. For instance, marketers can precisely target customers based on spending power – useful for companies advertising high-value items like a new phone. Marketers can also categorise customers based on the type of credit cards they use, which is helpful information for banks promoting e-wallets.
Additionally, retail media drives higher conversion rates than other digital advertising methods. As it is woven into eCommerce platforms, customers are more likely to buy advertised items while actively shopping, given their existing intention to make a purchase. This makes retail media an attractive option for businesses that want to spend their advertising budget more intelligently, and avoid unnecessary expenses on AdTech solutions with low ROI.
Going beyond online: Multichannel marketing
While retail media operates in-app, it can be strategically paired with off-app experiences to create a full-funnel campaign for maximum exposure. Marketers can broaden their reach and boost engagement by incorporating additional touchpoints that cover the entire customer journey.
Take an on-demand delivery platform like foodpanda for example. Marketers can leverage a variety of in-app solutions to drive consideration and conversion, including ads on the home screen, in-cart and order tracking pages.
To complement these efforts, marketers can integrate off-app solutions such as eDMs and push notifications to boost product awareness. This is particularly useful for product sampling campaigns, which are done when brands launch new products with little to no awareness. At foodpanda, we help drive these campaigns by sending push notifications to customers, making it easy for them to add the sample to their cart during checkout and receive it with their order.
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Innovations in retail media
Retail media networks provide unique ways for brands to differentiate themselves, which help better engagement with on- and offline. For instance, we’re seeing more retailers use solutions such as in-store beacon technology, where personalised deals and recommendations are sent to customers when they move near a specified area in real-time.
A notable trend is the blending of digital-out-of-home (DOOH) advertising with retail media, with ad spending in this market estimated to grow from US$114.4 billion in 2022 to over US$176 billion by 2028.
At foodpanda, we recently launched our Smart Rider Bags pilot, which serves as “mobile billboards” carried by delivery partners as they go about their routes. This DOOH solution can be deployed in specific areas with ad performance analytics remotely fed back to marketers through a live dashboard. Using insights gained, marketers can create cohesive offline to online (O2O) campaigns that result in better targeting outcomes.
Retail media is gaining traction and will only continue to grow more prevalent. To remain relevant, brands should start leveraging retail media for their advertising needs – timely given how third-party cookies are being phased out. By embracing retail media early, they can elevate their brand awareness, boost engagement, and enable more precise targeting to connect better with their target audiences.
