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Retail media is surging.
According to Insider, retail media ad spending is set to hit $45 billion this year and $61 billion by 2024. Morgan Stanley is forecasting $130 billion by 2025, while GroupM predicts retail media’s total addressable market will hit $160 billion by 2027.
But the enthusiasm swirling around the growth of retail media obscures the fact that Amazon is gobbling up an enormous portion of those ad dollars.
Yet Amazon’s retail media dominance doesn’t mean there isn’t an opportunity to scale retailer audiences across the open internet, says Megan Clarken, CEO of Criteo, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
That’s because there are enough ad dollars to go around, Clarken says. Of the more than $100 billion total addressable market for retail media over the next two years, she surmises that Amazon represents around 42% of that.
Which still leaves a massive pile of money for anyone that isn’t Amazon.
Despite Amazon’s many advantages, including the fact that people use it as a de facto search engine for stuff they need to buy, it’s “not a platform that most retailers would want to advertise on or associate with” because Amazon represents the competition, Clarken says.
“Behind every advertising dollar is [an] opportunity for the brand owner to make money,” Clarken says. “Once [advertisers] come off Amazon, they just want to find the right audience – an audience who’s in the right place on the right device … and ready to pull their credit card out.”
Also in this episode: Playing around in the Chrome Privacy Sandbox, the rationale behind Criteo’s acquisition of IPONWEB, a behind-the-scenes view on what it was like to close the IPONWEB deal after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an update on Commerce Max (Criteo’s soon-to-launch DSP) and the joys of being fluently ambidextrous.
