James Leaver, CEO of ad platform Multilocal, discusses how curation makes it easier than ever to scale (and target) large audiences for retail media success.

The digital advertising industry moves at pace, with fashions and trends coming and going as technology advances, legislation changes and audience behaviours evolve. Some things never go out of fashion, however, and advertisers will always be on the lookout for better means of reaching audiences at scale in a fast, efficient and transparent manner. 

That is exactly how multilocal uses audience curation , and why it is ideally placed to take advantage of the extraordinary growth the retail media sector is experiencing. It provides advertisers with enhanced, brand-safe, curated targeting of any specific global audience group – all with a simplicity the programmatic supply chain currently lacks.

Retail Media 101

Retail media is such hot property because it provides brands with prominent ad positions in the environments in which consumers browse, research and buy their products. This is exactly where advertisers want to be. The internet has a near infinite amount of shelf space, and the ability to target a curated audience in a growing sector has so much appeal simply because the rewards for getting it right are so high.

The retail media industry is expected to be worth $130bn across Europe and the US by 2026, and industry analysts have predicted that in the US alone, retail media will grow by 25% a year for the next four years. Taking advantage of this expansion makes sense for advertisers, but battling an increasingly complex, bloated programmatic supply chain poses serious challenges for advertisers. 

The Dawn Of Curation

So, what is the key to maximising success with retail media for advertisers? There are a number of unique opportunities curation can offer. At its core, curation is about building audiences at scale, and at multilocal we can do this by operating across multiple ad exchanges, to seek out and engage sizeable, appropriate audiences for our clients in pretty much any country.

Much of the work in creating a targeted audience profile takes place within the SSP. Clients save on fees that would traditionally be applied by the DSP, making it cost-effective to scale these audiences.

Working on the supply side makes the process of curating an audience faster and more efficient. The AI powered multilocal platform simplifies the process of creating multiple audience deals and saves you the headache of optimising and troubleshooting the deals once they are live.

We live in a privacy-first era, and the death of the cookie and the newly restricted use of personal data in advertising are causing significant shifts in how our industry operates, particularly in relation to identity resolution and attribution. The good news is that our targeting solutions are now cropping up that have been built from the ground up without any reliance on 3rd party cookies just like our own , making it a safe, legal and transparent method of targeting consumers. And transparency is important in a world where 15% of ad spend (about a third of supply chain costs) goes unattributed. 

This also makes curators such as ourselves able to provide a significant degree of guidance about where to buy these audiences, building a map of the available inventory across various platforms in order to advise advertisers on where their money is best spent. 

Case Study: Cavai

Recently we’ve been helping curate audiences for our friends at Cavai, the global leading experts in conversational advertising and pioneering specialists in conversational retail media. They came to multilocal because of the significant amount of retail media inventory we access, and were looking to collaborate on building audiences at scale for their campaigns.

We were able to tailor a number of retail audiences for them to experiment with, but we also serviced other requirements, such as confirming website viability and classifying domains according to brand safety, language and refresh rate to gain a granular understanding of the audience they are targeting.

We’re looking forward to sharing more on our partnership with Cavai in the future, and how it demonstrates the power of curation for retail media. But, in the meantime, curation continues to be an increasingly exciting, powerful force for programmatic advertising everywhere, and one that is capable of operating within the current supply chain while delivering enhanced performance metrics. 

Also published in: Modern Retail

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