Introduction
It is evident that the eCommerce sector has seen marked growth in the past two years (particularly after the pandemic receded). Consumers have begun to shop through online retailers – they have begun to prefer it – because of the conveniences available to them.
These changing shopping trends have initiated a cascade of favorable events on the side of advertisers across the globe:
- Online retailers have now become consequent owners of rich and full first-party consumer data
- The birth of retail media ad networks has presented a highly lucrative opportunity to advertisers to serve relevant ads to their consumers
- Consumers are willingly providing their details to online retailers (by creating accounts and signing up) to be served personalized experiences and shopping journeys
All of these incidental consequences of the boost in eCommerce have led the consumer electronics industry to leverage the benefit of digital advertising.
Among the most prominent names signing up with commerce advertising platforms is Best Buy, a world-famous consumer electronics brand.
Recently, Best Buy has signed up with the retail media ad network, Criteo, to serve its customers with relevant ads. All the associated benefits ensue: access to Criteo’s first-party consumer database, targeting ads to highly relevant, intent-driven consumers, gaining brand visibility across a wider audience, and much more.
Let’s see how consumer electronics brands like Best Buy can benefit from using ad networks for all their commerce advertising.
Consumer Electronics and Retail Media
According to a report published by Globenewswire, by the end of 2030, the consumer electronics segment will have reached a revenue figure of $1.31 trillion. Read that again: consumers across the world are willing to buy electronic goods worth over $1 trillion.
For the consumer electronics industry, this brings several pieces of good news:
- The market for their products is already warm
- Retail media ad networks can help electronics brands reach this warm audience
- Handy accessibility to first-party data can help consumer electronics agencies cater relevant advertisements to this warm audience
- They can maximize conversions through contextual advertising
Also, given that third-party cookies are going to either disappear or change for good, getting hands on high-quality consumer data is going to be difficult without a little assistance from the online retailers. This is where commerce advertising comes in.
Let’s see how a partnership between a retail media ad network and a consumer electronics brand makes total sense.
First-Party Data
All brands need some data on the consumers to prepare effective, relevant ads to serve to them. Therefore, the top advantage that consumer electronics brands can leverage from partnering with a demand-side platform is access to their first-party data.
Why is this important?
Of late, there have been massive concerns floating around the globe regarding consumer data privacy. As a result, several laws and regulations (like the GDPR and CCPA) have been put in place that prevent companies from gathering consumer data without explicit consent. This is what third-party data is – companies collecting consumer information in the background without asking them for it.
First-party data, however, is the data the consumer has willingly provided to a brand or a retailer by signing up on their digital platform and consenting to the terms of service. This data can be freely used by retailers, advertisers, and brands. It is issue-free and totally compliant with all the laws.
Wide Consumer Outreach
Consumer electronics brands already have a good market – the only thing that remains now is to reach this audience at the right places. There is no better way to go about it than to leverage the retail media ad networks covering the world’s favorite marketplaces.
For example, according to the data published on Similarweb, Amazon receives monthly website visits to the tune of over 2 billion customers. That is a lot of traffic. In order to bid for a display ad space on Amazon’s digital real estate, a consumer electronics brand has two options today:
- Either partner with Amazon’s own retail media network
- Look up another commerce advertising channel that helps you host your ad on Amazon’s digital space
This way, your brand will get a chance to display ads to this 2 billion population every month; improved conversion rates will ensue.
Multiformat Advertising
The advertisements for electronics generally need to deliver a lot of information in very little space.
As such, consumer electronics brands need to experiment with various advertising formats to get their product across in the best possible light. These formats could be text-based ads, images, dynamic displays, videos, and many more.
In a recent study by eMarketer, it was found that a shopper’s positive engagement with a video can:
- Increase their purchase intent by as much as 97%
- Increase the brand engagement and association by as much as 139%
Retail media ad networks let consumer electronics leverage this diversity in advertising formats to improve their bottom lines.
Smart Advertising
In the era of data, insights, and high competition, consumer electronics brands can’t afford to fall behind in wooing their consumers.
Commerce advertising agencies help these brands leverage important advertising tools to better focus and target their ads toward the right audience with:
- Artificial intelligence-equipped data harnessing platforms that give better insights on which audience to target, when and which space bid for
- Performance marketing to enable streamlining of advertising budgets
- Contextual advertising to help brands show their ads to a relevant audience
Many more functionalities and tools are made available to consumer electronics brands through retail media ad networks.
Wrapping Up
Retail media ad networks have become a great source and resource for first-party consumer data and a large audience pool that just lies in wait to be accessed and served.
For the consumer electronics market, this is a golden opportunity to target consumers with high purchasing intent (since online retailers see an audience that already wants to make a purchase).
Leveraging retail media ad networks to boost conversions is thus a highly lucrative way to improve consumer electronics business revenues.
