“Over the last 12 months, we’ve seen a flurry of [media advertising] activity from outside the retail sector,” our analyst Sarah Marzano said on an episode of the “Behind the Numbers: Reimagining Retail” podcast. Although retail kicked off the commerce media trends, financial services, travel companies, and intermediaries such as Instacart and Uber Eats are monetizing their customer data and setting up ad networks.
Financial media networks in particular are becoming mainstream, thanks to new platforms by Chase and PayPal—fueling a 64.1% increase in US financial media network ad spend this year, per our June 2024 forecast.
The rise of commerce media networks is changing the way advertisers approach targeting and how consumers interact with brands. Here are four predictions on these emerging trends.
“Similar to retail media, commerce media leverages first-party purchase-based data. It’s powered by the company who owns that data and that relationship with the customer, and whose core business is not media,” Marzano said.
This puts the commerce media networks in a good position to capture ad dollars reallocated from platforms that rely on third-party identifiers. To address the impact of cookie deprecation, 60% of US marketers are turning to first-party data strategies, according to March 2024 data by Epsilon and Phronesis Partners. More than 6 in 10 US marketers plan to keep digital ad spend the same but invest in tactics not reliant on third-party cookies, the same report found.
Consumers aren’t spending recreational time on commerce websites or apps in the same way they browse retailers for inspiration or shopping—behavior that may hinder the growth of advertising on banking or payments networks. This year, US consumers will spend only 28 minutes per day with mobile apps we categorize as “other activity,” which includes fintech services, per our June 2024 forecast. This accounts for 12.7% of all time spent with mobile device apps and 3.7% of time with digital media.
There was a lot of skepticism when social commerce first started. People turned to Facebook, for example, as a way to connect with friends and chat—not to buy a jacket, our analyst Maria Elm said. “We’ve seen that change.”
For commerce media, this behavioral change will take a lot of investment from major players in the financial services industry, but “incremental tweaks to consumer behavior over time are possible,” Elm said. “[Banks] must have a strategy in place for that.”
There's an opportunity for banks to find what’s important to their consumers, and connect the dots with ads that are not only relevant, but also align with their lifestyle, concerns, and values, Marzano said.
If financial services providers have data suggesting that a consumer is saving money, ads offering cost savings or emphasizing value will likely resonate with them. It makes brands ask the question, “How do you put your consumer first, break through the noise, and create an offer that is really engaging?,” Marzano said.
Some 28% of US and European consumers say receiving offers and messages that fit their age, gender, and lifestyle is a personalization feature they value most, per February 2024 data by Econsultancy and Adobe.
For financial media networks, consumer spending data is their bread and butter, “but that’s not their endgame,” Elm said. “Over the next year, banks [will draw] data from other products such as mortgages or investment accounts.” This volume of data could fill the gap that banks face not having access to SKU-level granularity, as they only have visibility into the amount of money spent at a retailer—not on the actual products purchased.
For example, consumers who take out a home improvement loan could be a useful audience segment for furniture, decor, or hardware brands.