Marketing
30 March
Meta's new ads cross social with retail media
The Facebook and Instagram parent also has new ad products geared toward in-store shopping and creators.
Photo by Dima Solomin on Unsplash
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Meta is frequently mentioned in the list of firms most-impacted by privacy moves such as Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, but the company’s advertising business remains a go-to source for ecommerce brands seeking to drive customer discovery.
As the Facebook and Instagram parent focuses on developing new ways to employ AI within its tools, it is also continuing to upgrade its advertising offerings.
In particular, Meta is honing in on personalization, especially as the consumer economy faces headwinds from inflation. According to the company’s research, 52% of shoppers want to find brands or products that they haven’t yet learned about, but line up with their shopping preferences.
At Shoptalk, Meta talked about a pair of new ad formats that are designed specifically for retail and ecommerce brands. Here’s a look at areas of retail that Meta ads are powering in the latest wave of advertising:
Retail media
The aforementioned privacy measures have in part ushered in the growth of retail media networks, which offer the ability to advertise on the same platform where shoppers browse and ultimately buy products.
While this form of advertising originates outside of social media platforms, Meta is testing new tools to power discovery across channels ranging from social media to other ecommerce sites. These include Managed Partner Ads Lite, which use data from a retailer’s CRM to help CPG brands drive demand for products on Meta’s social media platforms.
Early testing is showing “incremental, omnichannel performance for brands,” according to Meta.
The results: Walgreens Advertising Group partnered with Meta and a large national CPG brand on a campaign across 75 SKUs. It drove a 3.9% lift in health remedies, and a 2.5% lift in skincare products sold.
Offline shopping
Meta said these ads can dynamically target users near stores with both relevant pricing and product availability. It’s part of a push to marry digital tools with in-person shopping experiences. Increasingly, the boundary between the store and ecommerce is blurring, and advertising will begin to account for this.
The results: The data coming back is showing that advertising online can drive offline sales. Meta said that retail advertisers recently ran a test of 502 Conversion Lift studies. In these studies, 57% of Meta ads optimized for online conversions drove incremental in-store sales.
Creators
Among Gen Z, creators have outsize influence. Meta shared that almost four out of five members of the 18-25 generation have taken a shopping action as a result of creator content.
To reach them more effectively, Meta created Branded Content Ads. These allow businesses seeking to advertise and creators on Meta to partner on an ad. Through this product, the creator content is used as the creative in an ad campaign.
The results: During the spring 2022 fashion season, Meta said Kate Spade New York tapped into Meta’s creator network, leading 78% of content to reach a net-new target audience in May and June of 2022.
These are a few of the latest shopping-focused ads to roll out from Meta. For more, check out our recent feature on promising early results from Advantage+ shopping campaigns.
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Retail Media
7m
Gopuff moves fast on a new retail media approach: Non-endemic ads
The quick commerce marketplace is partnering with Rokt to expand beyond CPG advertising.
(Photo via Gopuff)
In some ways, retail media campaigns function like promotions in a brick-and-mortar store.
With retail media, brands can reach customers with advertising on the websites where shopping is taking place. This proximity to the point of sale provides an opportunity for brands who are already selling within a marketplace to take advantage of opportunities to elevate their position in search results, and stand out from a crowd of listings. This is the same goal that many brands have when they purchase highly-trafficked space in a store. But instead of checkout aisle and endcap placements, there are now sponsored products in search results.
But that’s not the end of the story.
The fact that retail media is internet-based and powered by first-party data collected at the purchase level is poised to open up new opportunities to reach consumers that go beyond today’s norms.
One such example is the introduction of non-endemic advertising. This allows brands that aren’t directly selling a product within a marketplace to purchase ad space.
Why would a brand want to advertise in a place where they can’t make a direct sale? The thinking goes like this: The marketplaces have the audience, and the data on them that allows for precise targeting. They can be places to learn about a new product, just as much as they can be a place to buy.
One early example of the recognition of the opportunity in non-endemic advertising arrived this month. The quick delivery marketplace Gopuff partnered with ecommerce technology company Rokt to enable brands outside the CPG category to advertise on Gopuff’s app.
Under the hood, the companies are combining machine learning technology from Rokt that is designed to present relevant offers to customers with a Gopuff audience that is made up of Gen Zers and millennials, engaged and curious about trying new brands.
The partnership will enable advertisers to target customer segments by demographic and location. Customers will also receive offers to try new brands, such as Hulu, AdoreMe and Noom.
What sets this advertising approach apart will be the consumer categories where it is focused. Typically, ads on Gopuff are focused around the convenience store items already available on the app. Now, shoppers will see other kinds of products in the mix, and they will click through to checkout pages that are outside Gopuff if they are interested in buying. This also has the potential to change how advertisers approach media spend. It means everyone from a sporting goods brand to a car company can now consider Gopuff as they plan. They must also consider how these channels work together as a whole.
"We are thrilled to partner with Gopuff and enhance its ad business, helping it move beyond the CPG category," said Elizabeth Buchanan, CCO of Rokt, in a statement. "By delivering relevant offers to Gopuff users, Rokt will help Gopuff Ads' brand partners across all categories create more meaningful customer connections and drive incremental sales."
The partnership underscores how retail media networks have three key building blocks for digital advertising: They’re a destination that people visit with an intent to shop, they have the audience that brands want to reach and they have data that can help to reach the right consumers.
It points to how ecommerce marketplaces can not only become the new store, but also emerge as ad networks like Facebook and Google before them. It’s a big reason why retail media networks have exploded over the last year, and why growth is forecast to continue to accelerate.
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