Most retail media teams already know what they can change. The more difficult decision to make is when, especially once a program spans multiple retailers and a large product catalog. Executing a plan slows down during the time between noticing a change and getting the right fix applied across the account. While it might be easy enough to spot a change, it is harder to update multiple SKUs across several campaigns without taking on a day’s worth of manual work. 

In campaign management, I push for a simple operating rule: treat retail media optimization like a routine you can run even when the week is busy. That routine does two things well: It helps you spot movement early, and it makes it easier to apply updates across many campaigns without turning the work into a click marathon. Here’s how to make this routine work. 

Start by looking at what changes week by week

Instead of looking at a snapshot summary of what happened, compare so you can see what changed. Start every review by comparing performance to a prior period that makes sense for your business. For example, for daily work, compare to yesterday. For weekly work, compare to last week. For monthly work, compare to last month. Also pull the same time period from last year when seasonality matters. Year-over-year context helps you separate a real performance shift from a predictable calendar pattern, especially around holidays, promotions, and category cycles. 

Once you look at change over time, you can sort what you see into the three buckets that matter: 

1. A product or retail condition changed. That might be availability, pricing, Buy Box status, or competition changes (their promotion strategies could have changed). 
2. Campaign settings or targeting changed. Pacing, targeting mix, bids, or placement performance shifted. 
3. The reporting view changed. Retailers do not all report the same way, and attribution can differ by ad type and placement. 

That sorting step keeps you from doing bid work to solve a product issue, and it keeps you from blaming the retailer when the campaign setup is the real problem. 

One practical note: not every retailer provides the same fields. Use what you have on each network and treat additional commerce context as a bonus signal when it is available. 

Daily retail media optimization review: keep budget pointed at what can convert

A daily review is meant to look at where you can prevent obvious waste and protect coverage. This is different from a review where you’re looking to optimize the whole account.  

It helps to look at delivery and pacing. If a campaign is not serving or a budget is pacing wrong, nothing else matters until that is corrected. 

Next, it’s important to look at concentration. Spend almost always clusters. If the top set of SKUs is shifting, the day’s performance shifts with it. 

After doing that, check whether the SKUs you’re paying to promote still have a fair shot to compete today. Look for changes that can undermine conversion even if your campaign settings did not move, such as pricing shifts, inventory pressure, slower fulfillment, weaker product page content, or a change in the competitive set, like a new promotion, a competitor price drop, or more aggressive bidding in the category. 

Were there sharp swings on the same set of top spenders? Look at whether there was a big move in CPC, conversion rate, or sales. This can help you confirm inputs, then decide whether to act. 

Daily actions should stay simple. Pause what cannot convert and redirect spend to the next-best set. Reduce exposure when you need to buy time. Save deeper structure work for the weekly pass. 

Weekly retail media optimization review: fix patterns and cut back on manual work

With daily reviews, you can catch exceptions. Weekly reviews allow you to improve how the account runs. If you see the same problem across a set of campaigns or SKUs, apply one change across the set of SKUs and move on. 

The weekly review also gives you a cleaner window for decisions that need more than a single day of signal: 

• Tighten targeting based on what repeated, not what spiked once. 
• Adjust bids and budgets where performance held steady long enough to trust it. 
• Decide which SKUs earn more investment and which ones need constraints. 

Weekly is also where testing belongs so you can learn and not create chaotic changes. Pick one change you can explain, write down what you changed and why, then review it the next week before you add another variable. 

Monthly retail media optimization review: reset budgets, structure, and measurement 

Monthly work should feel different from weekly work. Weekly work improves performance inside the current plan. Monthly work checks whether the plan still matches the business. 

This is where you make the decisions that reduce rework later: Rebalance budget by retailer, category, and the product sets the business actually wants to grow. Then clean up structure that slows execution or muddies reporting. Once you’ve done that, you can confirm the measurement view answers the question your stakeholders care about.  

Where Rithum fits in the day-to-day work 

A review routine only helps when it leads to fast, consistent changes. Most delays are a result of repeat work that gets handled one campaign at a time. 

That is the gap our digital marketing, retail media managed services, and tooling are designed to close. We use rules-based automation and filters to improve bidding, keyword, and dayparting strategies, and we automate key campaign components like bidding, dayparting, and ad status.  

On the operations side, we also take on the work that tends to clog a week: campaign creation, tracking, and reporting across multiple channels. 

The benefit is speed and consistency, especially when the same change needs to roll across a large catalog. 

If you want a quick way to assess whether your current approach will scale, look at one week of account work and count how often you made the same change in more than one place. When repetition is high, the best process in the world still slows down without a better execution path. 

A better way to value support 

If you are considering a platform, managed support, or both, do not start with feature checklists. Start with a workflow question: 

When performance shifts midweek, how quickly can your team apply the fix across the full catalog, across retailers, without creating a second job in spreadsheets? 

If you want to pressure-test your current process, our team can walk through the cadence above using a recent slice of your program and identify where repeat work is slowing you down. The retail media services overview is the right place to start if you want a team to help run execution day to day. 

Nick Szeto is Senior Manager, Advertising Account Management, at Rithum.

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Many brands face the same issue as they grow their online business: campaign costs climb, but performance doesn’t rise enough to offset it. They’re left in limbo: more budget alone won’t solve the problem, but pulling back from digital channels isn’t the answer either.  

For Draper Tools and Moen, that challenge led them to Rithum. With Rithum handling the heavy lifting behind the scenes, both brands turned inefficient ad spend into stronger returns without stretching their teams. Here’s a closer look at how they optimized their digital marketing strategies with Rithum—and the results that followed. 

Draper Tools increases orders by 470% with 50% lower ACOS 

Draper Tools, a century-old U.K.-based supplier of hand and power tools, was investing heavily in online sales channels, but wasn’t seeing the results to justify the spend. Despite their reputation, Draper Tools found that the cost of acquiring customers was uncomfortably high. For their small team, manually managing bids and attempting to rebalance spend across a large number of SKUs grew time-consuming and increasingly ineffective. 

Draper Tools turned to Rithum to maximize their marketing investments. Rithum streamlined testing, monitoring, and ad spend rebalancing, resulting in a dramatic transformation of Draper Tools’ online business: advertising cost of sales (ACOS) dropped by 50%, and total orders surged by 470%. 

With better data and reporting from Rithum, Draper Tools spends less time on daily execution and more on long-term strategy, empowering them to make more informed decisions about where and when to invest their marketing dollars. 

Read the full case study. 

Moen grows retail media revenue by 194% with full-funnel campaigns 

Moen, a leading kitchen and bath fixtures brand, struggled to optimize its products’ presence on Amazon. Too often, shoppers were served competitors’ products—a consequence of Moen’s up-and-down keyword performance and a lack of reach through non-branded avenues. 

Moen partnered with Rithum to revamp its Amazon advertising strategy. Rithum bridged the gap between marketing teams at Moen and Amazon, allowing Moen to better leverage Amazon’s platform. The result was a full-funnel strategy that included sponsored video campaigns, bid timing adjustments, and expanded targeting to reach new audiences earlier in the buying journey (a departure from Moen’s traditional branded campaigns). 

The shift paid off. Within a year, Moen achieved a 194.5% increase in retail media revenue for its promoted products. Moen’s improved performance not only allows it to reach more shoppers but also increases ROI from its investment in Amazon. 

Read the full case study. 

Smarter spend, stronger results with Rithum 

Both Draper Tools and Moen faced a common challenge: spending more on ads without getting more in return. But by leveraging Rithum’s platform to optimize their digital marketing strategies, both companies unlocked meaningful, measurable gains. 
 
Rithum’s marketing solutions can help your business optimize campaign performance and maximize marketing investments.

The post How Moen and Draper Tools turned underperforming ads into measurable results  appeared first on Rithum.

At Rithum LIVE—our flagship event that brought brands, retailers, and partners together in New York and London—the pattern was clear: shoppers are changing how they find products, clean data is more important than ever, AI is everywhere (though not being optimized), and retail media is being redefined. As CEO Lou Keyes put it, “The battleground is shifting from persuasion to precision . . . You can no longer convince consumers to buy with just more ads or louder ads.”  

Here are five of our favorite big moments from the sessions, focused on how leaders are fixing data quality, proving AI ROI, preparing for agentic shopping, adjusting retail media, and turning dashboards into decisions. If you’re curious about what’s coming for commerce in 2026, start here—then dive into the full talks on Rithum LIVE On-Demand.  

Data readiness: close the confidence–accuracy gap 

Suzin Wold Chief Marketing Officer at Rithum, ran a reality check in her Rithum LIVE keynote: “80% of you know the data you are using is bad, while 100% feel confident in your performance reports. You have really super high confidence, but you have really, really low accuracy,” Suzin said. Her rule is straightforward: “It is not about acting faster. It is about reacting smarter.” This takeaway, and the rest of the data analysis from her keynote, was built on The 2026 commerce readiness index, which reports on 200 retail and brand executives’ responses to industry-landscape questions. It points to heavy manual effort and inconsistent data as the root of slow, error-prone reactions. Bad data doesn’t just slow work; it produces the wrong results like mispriced items, wasted ad spend, and higher returns. 

Watch Suzin’s full session for more industry trends from the readiness index, which is built on a survey of brands and retailers.  

AI and ROI: clean inputs, measurable outcomes 

95% of AI projects fail to deliver ROI and only 5% move beyond pilots, Ali Irturk, Chief Technology Officer at Rithum, said. “If you have bad data you’re going to make bad decisions a lot faster.” 

Here’s what it looks like for retailers and brands when the inputs are right. “We found that 200 SKUs were driving 15.5% of the returns,” said Seb Spiegler, Head of AI at Rithum, in discussing one Rithum client use case. Updating titles, materials, and size charts fixed the problem. “Returns went down, margins went up,” Seb said. 

Rithum’s Magic Mapper, powered by RithumIQ, cut categorization and attribute mapping from days to minutes in 100+ channels and in more than 30 languages, Seb said. Because publishing, inventory, and advertising run on the same source of truth in Rithum, those changes travel quickly to the places that matter. “Models matter, but outcomes matter even more,” Seb said.

Watch Ali and Seb’s session where they show how they spotted the 200 SKUs, which edits they prioritized first, and where the gains surfaced (returns, margin, rank).  

Agentic shopping: make claims machine-readable 

Discovery is changing as consumer behavior changes. “In the past, [discovery] was user initiated. Now it’s going to be AI agent initiated,” Arun Kumar Global Head of AI at Accenture Song, said. Agentic AI doesn’t react to slogans or ad spend. “Your brand actually is the moat and agents see it as data and rules.” They verify off the website, too: “If you are best in something, I want proof that you are best in something. I’m going to go to Reddit. I’m going to read your reviews.” 

Arun suggests that the biggest thing to do now is to encode the facts—materials, price, availability by location, shipping cutoffs, and returns policy—in your website so assistants can confirm them. For the rest of his best practices and examples on getting ready for agentic shopping, watch his session here.  

Retail media: let spend listen to inventory and returns 

Media works harder when it runs on commerce truth. “We decided to move back and double down on our own platform,” Louis Camassa, Director of Product for the Brands Platform at Rithum, said. “We’re using that data to show where clients could spend and get the best ROI.” 

Shelf control completes the loop. “See where you rank, your brand’s share of shelf or share of voice, then make strategic decisions from an advertising and organic perspective,” Meghan Barden, Director of Global Retail Media at Rithum, said. When retail media and commerce data live in one platform, bids and budgets can adjust to stock, margin, and delivery promise in real time, steering spend toward products that can ship and convert. Keeping media and commerce signals together inside Rithum helps avoid wasting spend on items that are out of stock or likely to bounce back.

Watch Louis and Meghan’s session for examples of routing budgets to in-stock, high-margin SKUs. 

Decision intelligence: define the choice, then act 

“Companies don’t have insight problems. They have decision problems,” Daniel Hulme, Chief AI Officer at WPP, said. Pick the wrong formulation and the option set stretches “longer than the age of the universe.” Pick well and a machine solves it in milliseconds. 

The talk reframed AI, saying most companies don’t suffer from a lack of insight—they struggle to turn insight into consistent, high-quality decisions. According to David, our “fast brain” loves intuition. But the real world runs on hard trade-offs where the wrong algorithm can turn a millisecond task into an “age-of-the-universe” problem. He drew a sharp line between automation and AI, where automation just repeats yesterday’s choice. AI, properly defined, is goal-directed and adaptive—it makes a call, learns from the outcome, and updates the next call. 

“Large language models are really good at knowing things about the world,” says David. “They are not good at making predictions. They’re definitely not good at making complex predictions.” The business gains show up when you pair them with explainable machine learning and optimization for things like allocations, pricing, routing, and channel mix.  

The takeaway was refreshingly human: start by naming the decision you need to get right, be explicit about the objective and constraints, and then choose the method. If AI learns over time and can explain why it works, you’re building intelligence—not just another dashboard. For the full talk, watch Daniel Hulme’s keynote here. 

Watch these sessions and more on Rithum LIVE On-Demand here. 

Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity. 

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The grocery aisle isn’t just where consumers shop for their daily essentials; it’s where some of the most powerful retail media opportunities are unfolding. The grocery sector is reshaping the future of retail media. Today’s brands and retailers are reaching consumers through physical locations as well as online – and the grocery aisle holds insights into household demographics and buying behaviors that allow brands and retailers to personalize the shopping experience like never before.

That momentum and competition will continue to grow in 2025, according to Rithum’s Meghan Barden, director of global retail media. Brands and retailers have an opportunity to personalize ads and promote products consumers are interested in buying. The grocery category provides some of the most powerful and robust insights into household demographics and buying behaviors – and advertisers are taking notice. They are shifting more of their ad spend into the grocery category. Retailers can use first-party data to match advertisers with highly targeted audiences and create campaigns that resonate.

That data is invaluable as consumer behavior continues to evolve with one in three consumers doing some portion of their grocery shopping online, according to SmartCommerce data.

“The grocery sector of retail media has had significant longevity in the industry – however, it has also been the slowest to expand or innovate. I am excited to see more grocery retailers lean into their unique offerings and highlight their reward programs to attract advertisers who are hungry to tap into those 1P audiences.”

– Meghan Barden, director of global retail media, Rithum

How to use retail media as part of your omnichannel strategy

The grocery sector’s move toward digital links the physical and online shopping experience. While grocery sector consumers are more open than ever to shopping online, for some items, like alcoholic beverages, 64% of consumers said they are still shopping in store, according to SmartCommerce. For brands, this creates a two-fold opportunity: an understanding of how in-store and online shopping behaviors intersect. That information is key to engaging consumers throughout their shopping experience.

“Brands that can cross-functionally leverage important retailer data from in-store and online purchases can adjust their marketing strategies accordingly. Meet consumers where they are shopping – whether that’s the aisles of a physical grocery store or on an app,” Barden said.

A data-driven approach allows brands to work with retail media management partners like Rithum’s Retail Media Managed Services team, which helps retailers deliver precise, timely insights. Rithum’s team can provide accurate data as well as nuanced metrics, such as share of voice, tailored to the specific needs of the brand.

Grocery is expected to continue to be a juggernaut of consumer data in 2025. As a result, the competition to dominate retail media will only intensify. While grocery retailers have been some of the first to adopt retail media strategies hosted on their own platforms, other technology, such as delivery apps, will continue to compete as they are launching rapidly across the sector.

Ready to elevate your retail media strategy? Discover how Rithum can support your journey. Schedule a demo today.

The post Grocery in Retail Media will Unlock Customer Connections in 2025 – Are You Ready? appeared first on Rithum.

We’ve analyzed trends that stood out from the five-day period between Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday and how these lessons can impact 2025 e-commerce trends for brands and retailers. Consumers spent more online than ever before, according to Adobe Analytics data. For Rithum clients, AI, social commerce and retail media strategy took center stage. Here’s what brands and retailers are investing in to reach more consumers in 2025.

1. Explosion of product categories for third-party (3P) marketplaces is reshaping e-commerce in 2025.

Brands and retailers will continue to use artificial intelligence (AI) to manage product inventory across multiple sales channels including marketplaces and direct-to-consumer websites. Retailers like Amazon and Walmart use AI for real-time inventory management.

“Walmart’s rapidly expanding assortment presents new challenges to suppliers. However, our latest Walmart Categorizer, now in Rithum’s AI Magic Mapper, ensured seamless migration for hundreds of clients managing millions of SKUs. This highlights Rithum’s leadership in scalable AI solutions,” said Sebastian Spiegler, Director of AI, Rithum.

Rithum is currently focusing on Profitability Benchmarking, which is the process of identifying top channels, pricing strategies and returns insights.

“Profitability Benchmarking at the SKU-level is the ‘holy grail’ for brands. This process is a key 2025 focus area for Rithum and is already being piloted with strategic clients,” Spiegler said.

2. TikTok Shop will continue to revolutionize discovery and influence.

In just one year, TikTok Shop has become one of Rithum’s top 10 sales channels since launching in December 2023. This includes merchant giants like Amazon, Walmart, Target+, eBay and Zalando.

“TikTok’s innovative platform connects content with commerce enabling intuitive product discovery through viral, low-effort videos created by thousands of creators. TikTok account users with only a thousand followers are now product curators, streamlining affiliate marketing and enabling effortless monetization directly in the app,” said Lou Camassa, Director of Product at Rithum.

Currently, Rithum supports TikTok Shop in the US and UK, with launches in Spain and Ireland planned for early 2025.

“This is an incredible proposition for EMEA sellers to tap into a growing and dynamic market,” Camassa said

3. Brands and retailers are being more strategic about retail media budgets.

Consumers continued to shop well before BFCM in October. As a result, Rithum retail media clients spread-out retail media budgets.

“Rithum retail media brands and retailers had to strategically pace their seasonal budgets for a longer peak season before and after BFCM. Specifically, during BCFM week, we advised clients not to over-invest and instead ride a continuous wave of peak seasonality wins while managing the budget thoughtfully. While budget increases only averaged 3%, we were still seeing wins. This included meeting their efficiency goals with an average of 1.7 advertising cost of sales (ACOS) as one example,” said Meghan Barden, director, global retail media, Rithum.

Going into 2025, Barden believes that the promotional holiday period will continue to extend into October and well through the end of December. Clients should be prepared to extend their seasonal budgets to accommodate this length of time. Also, brands and retailers should be open to peaks and valleys in their spend and return. Leveraging product data YoY, such as noting high performing SKUs, is a strategic way to map the seasonal timeframe approach in 2025.

Delve deeper into what’s trending in third-party (3P) commerce in 2025.

Read more about trends in AI, cross-border commerce, social commerce, retail media and supply chain in Rithum’s 2024 State of 3P Commerce Report.

The post 3 E-Commerce Trends from Cyber 5 to Carry Into 2025 appeared first on Rithum.

1. Manage your inventory and product organization throughout Cyber 5.

• Audit your stock: You’ve made sure your warehouse or fulfillment partner is prepared for high demand. Make sure you have clear processes in place to switch distribution centers as demand increases.
• Product organization: Confirm that single, bundle and variation SKU assortment is in place. This is not the time to test anything new in a live environment.
• Backorder and restocks: Have a backorder system ready if you are not already prepared for fast restocks for items that sell out quickly. Amazon does not allow inventory replenishment until the new year. Make sure you have backup with Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) should you run out of inventory.

Assign responsibilities to the inventory management and logistics/operations team.

• Inventory manager: Perform the inventory audit and set up alerts for low stock and immediate communication to front-facing e-commerce channel managers.
• Logistics/operations team: Coordinate with fulfillment partners to confirm stock levels and restock procedures and open lines of communication for delays.

2. Finalize discounts, promotions and bundles.

• Advertising and retail media strategy: Ensure your campaigns are optimized to the most profitable target audience, prioritize products for the holiday sales season and ensure product listing data, images, video and content are recently updated. This is not the time to have your campaign hit their daily spend cap. Increase your bid ceilings or run uncapped and ensure your ads are visible the entire week.
• Discount Strategy: Set up Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) promotions, including sitewide sales, category-specific discounts and flash deals. Clearly define the terms and conditions for each.
• Communication Strategy: Finalize days/times – down to the minute – for when email, text and social communication will be sent out.
• Bundle Deals: Consider offering product bundles at discounted prices to increase average order value (AOV).

Assign responsibilities to the marketing team, e-commerce manager and creative team.

• Marketing: Finalize and schedule promotional campaigns, including discounts and bundles. Have promotional banners and visuals ready for launch. Ensure you have a clear, by the hour breakout of when communication will occur across customer outreach channels.
• E-commerce manager: Ensure discount codes are properly implemented and working on the site. Update product pages with the correct pricing and offers.
• Creative: Design banners, pop-ups and other assets that highlight discounts and promotions.

3. Double-check automated reporting and dashboard report set ups.

• Key metrics: Monitor conversion rate, traffic and AOV. Set up automated email alerts for stock levels, sales performance and ad spend ROI. During peak selling periods, search trends can fluctuate. Ensure someone is checking auto campaigns to capitalize on trends and move those to manual campaigns to maximize opportunity during Cyber 5.
• Monitor ad spend: Set up integrations between your ad platforms and e-commerce store to track ROI on paid campaigns (Google Ads, Facebook, etc.). Ensure someone is watching this in real-time to adjust spend, monitor competitive threats and be able to adjust. This includes tapping into a larger bucket of spending if a clear opportunity presents itself.

Assign responsibilities to data analyst/business intelligence teams, marketing and e-commerce manager.

• Data analyst/business intelligence: Set up and monitor dashboards to ensure key KPIs are automatically tracked and actionable insights delivered.
• Marketing: Keep a close eye on paid ad performance and adjust budgets, targeting and creatives as needed. Paid marketing managers or agency managers are available, real time.
• E-commerce manager: Monitor sales performance and pivot promotions if certain products or categories are underperforming and communicate this to marketing. Make sure ads across your website are relevant to the page and experience. Irrelevant ads reduce the likelihood that a shopper will purchase a product.

4. Prepare customer support systems and FAQs.

• Expand support channels: Ensure live chat, helpdesk, and other support channels are active and capable of handling increased volume.
• Proactively answer questions: Update the FAQ section with anticipated BFCM-related queries like shipping times, returns, or promotions.

Assign responsibilities to customer support, marketing and e-commerce manager.

• Customer support team: Ensure enough customer support employees are available to handle high-volume inquiries. Prepare scripts for common BFCM issues (order status, shipping, returns).
• Marketing: Update the FAQ section on the website with clear, concise answers to common questions.
• E-commerce manager: Ensure clear communication with fulfillment and shipping partners so customer support can give accurate updates on delivery times.

How to organize your team for Black Friday and Cyber Monday peak holiday selling events

Conduct daily briefings to check in and review metrics, discuss any roadblocks and realign priorities. Ensure all teams are aware of their specific responsibilities during Cyber 5.

Cross-functional collaboration is key between marketing, customer support, logistics and the e-commerce team. Regularly share performance data, stock levels and customer feedback to stay on the same page.

Finally, plan for pre- and post-BFCM analysis. Schedule a debrief now. Schedule another after the peak sales event. Share a pre-read summary from each department containing what worked and what needs to be improved. There is limited time to enact changes to ensure a successful December selling period. Learn how Rithum can help your business here.

The post Four Tips to Help Retailers and Brands Be Successful During Cyber 5 appeared first on Rithum.

Significant growth for key categories

According to some experts, purchase behavior shifted from the first day of the Amazon Prime Day sale to the second, initially starting with a surge in shopping for household essentials and grocery items. This was attributed to the higher cost of daily goods and more budget-conscious shoppers spending less during the first day of the event. The second day saw more purchases in higher value categories like electronics. These were attributed to the merchant’s heavy promotions toward Amazon’s own electronic brand offerings.

Prime day historically has been a top event for specific category growth on a national and global level. This October’s event further reinforced that trend, according to Digital Commerce 360. Specific categories of note were:

• 36% growth for electronics
• 36% growth for general apparel
• 21% growth for health and beauty

These categories are consistently high performers year after year, especially as the brand and product competition within each category continues to increase. We also expect social commerce to sell well in these categories through social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram this holiday season.

Millennial shopper trends

The millennial shopper has been the highest spending demographic group in previous Amazon Prime events. However, this demographic’s purchase power has declined. The rationale for their reduced spending could be that they are savvy shoppers and therefore take more energy from advertisers and retailers alike to gain trust and establish creditability. While deals can be attractive to these consumers, they rely more heavily on their peers for reviews and word of mouth creditability. As this will be a continued expectation of this generational shopper, it is advised that brands and sellers incorporate story telling into their overall campaigns and messaging to target millennial consumers in future.

Retail media campaign ad type trends

As retail media continues to grow and rely on first-party (1P) audiences for reach and efficiency, it is no surprise that activity within Amazon DSP (demand-side platform) experienced an increase in advertising spending and activity during Prime Day events. Coupling Amazon DSP and AMC (Amazon Marketing Cloud) is a compelling strategy for maximizing ad spend while leveraging the most targeted audiences during sales events. Concurrently, sponsored product and sponsored brand ads saw an increase in advertiser spend but performed less efficiently or received fewer clicks. Brands will continue to diversify campaigns within a retailer ecosystem to maximize reach and exposure.

Applying Prime Day seller strategy to peak season and Cyber 5

With the increased pressure to maximize sales during Prime Days, brands and retailers need to focus on what will serve them best during these high traffic days. During the holiday peak season, sellers can combine refreshed page optimization with product prioritization based on “digital share of shelf” data such as the amount of competitors in the category or the amount of reach a campaign has had.

During peak selling, there is more emphasis on boosting budgets. But it is important to remember that prioritization of products remains a key component of sales strategy.

Retailers and brands use promotions to attract consumers

While Amazon hosts two of the largest e-commerce sales each year, other retailers are deploying their own sales strategies to compete. Walmart hosted a June members-only weekly long sale, quickly followed by a July sale directly competing with the first of the two annual Amazon Prime sales events. Target held Target Circle week from July 7-July 13. Other niche retailers such as Petco, Chewy and others also lowered some prices in a price match effort while Prime events run to offer shoppers compelling discounts. We expect a similar strategy during the holiday shopping season.

Shoppers are comparison price shopping online. 83% of global consumers will visit two or more websites before buying, according to the 2023 Online Consumer Behavior Global Report by Rithum and research firm Dynata.

Apply lessons from Amazon Prime Days in real-time

Rithum’s centralized dashboard provides brands and retailers with a view of operations to track and synchronize fulfillment, inventory and orders across multiple channels. Features like Rithum’s repricer automation, performance monitoring, stock alerts, order routing and management, shipping integration, and returns management help sellers avoid errors on marketplace listings.

For retail media, Rithum’s team creates custom reports that provide data-driven insights. It uses campaign monitoring data, which contains thousands of campaigns, to help achieve optimal performance as well as help prevent incorrect bids or ad pauses. Holiday readiness reports help brands identify what worked during peak events like Amazon Prime Days and what needs improvement before the holiday rush. Rithum’s actionable insights show sellers what to consider when refining strategy for holiday shopping as well as make changes during Black Friday and Cyber Monday peak selling days.

Learn how Rithum’s integrated commerce solution can help you navigate the holiday shopping season on marketplaces by scheduling a demo today.

Meghan Barden is director of global retail media at Rithum.

The post How to Use Amazon Prime Day Lessons During the Peak Holiday Season appeared first on Rithum.

1. Retailers and brands want to reach more consumers online. 

Today’s consumers are shopping online. Retailers and brands need to be present where shoppers already are – they can’t decide for consumers where they should shop. 40% of executives surveyed said reaching a larger consumer base is a top reason why they’re selling using a 3P commerce business model.  

2. Expand your access to more digital marketing opportunities. 

Retail media advertising allows retailers and brands to reach – and target – consumers as they shop online. 36% of surveyed executives said they use 3P commerce to have access to broader digital marketing opportunities, such as retail media advertising. 

3. Increase cross-border e-commerce selling opportunities. 

It can be difficult to manage product inventory, product information and catalog translations at scale when selling internationally. So it’s not surprising that 96% of executives agree that selling cross-border would not be possible without 3P commerce. Retailers and brands must consider how to navigate cross-border payments, currency valuations, global logistics, international legal requirements and other factors when selling cross-border. 36% of surveyed executives said that a primary motivation for using a 3P commerce business model is so they can add or expand their cross-border opportunities.  

How Rithum can help sellers grow profitably on marketplaces 

Today’s consumer is comparison shopping. Through its access to hundreds of channels, Rithum can help retailers and brands with their efforts to maximize growth. Expanding into global marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Zalando and others, requires managing and updating product catalogs. This manual process takes time and costs resources. By automating the process through Rithum, retailers and brands can make updates in real time through one platform. 

Rithum’s platform helps sellers optimize their retail media advertising strategy on marketplaces by adjusting bidding, targeting and budgeting in real-time. By using sponsored product listings, banner ads and video ads, sellers can increase visibility and engagement directly with retail platforms. 

Selling cross-border requires managing multiple languages, legal requirements, logistics and other factors. Rithum partners with a network of the world’s leading fulfillment and logistics companies to facilitate cross-border e-commerce expansion. Features like Rithum’s AI Magic Mapper uses artificial intelligence to help brands reduce time-to-site and can reduce the time it takes sellers to onboard to new global marketplaces. 

Download the full report to learn more about the other reasons retailers and brands are turning to 3P commerce to grow profitably here. 

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First-party data is the key advantage of retail media for marketers

A clear takeaway from the event was the increasing importance of first-party data. For commerce-focused technology providers, this data provides the necessary insights and institutional knowledge at the forefront of retail media. First-party insights – such as historical purchase activity, SKU-level data, and retailer strength in specific categories – are now central to retail media strategies, presenting more long-term opportunity. Brands can (and should) leverage what they’ve learned from prior campaigns, while also being mindful of the specific commerce environment of each.

Retail media is desperate for better measurement and standardization

There is increasing concern that, while the industry is crushing ad revenue projections year over year, the channel still lacks the basic maturity and standardization required for consistent reporting. Across the industry, retailers have developed processes to deliver data in their own unique format. With more than 220 retail media networks now in operation, the absence of standard metrics for measurement and reporting has created confusion for brands. This inconsistency makes it difficult for brands to assess performance and determine the best areas to invest in the future. The call for consistent, standardized performance metrics and greater transparency around methodologies is growing louder, creating an urgency for retail media to create more consistency as soon as possible.

As digital marketing evolves, is retail media already an outdated concept?

Over the past decade, retail media has become a critical component of brands’ marketing strategies, serving as a major driver of growth and significant opportunities. However, its rapid growth and evolution have emphasized the need for brands and retailers to remain agile – especially as the industry reaches new levels of maturity. Some leaders have even suggested “retail media” may already be an outdated concept. Instead, “commerce media” has emerged as a better fitting term, expanding beyond the traditional retailer environments to reflect the integration of social commerce and other channels.

These trends indicate a greater push for first-party data and better measurement strategies, making now the time to invest in a strategic partner who will help you navigate the complexities of retail media as it evolves. Rithum can help you reach your full potential in marketplaces. Learn more here.

Meghan Barden is director of global retail media at Rithum.

The post Advertising Week 2024: How Retail Media Continues to Evolve appeared first on Rithum.

Be strategic with retail media full funnel spend

Retail media has transformed to being more than just a performance media tactic driven by trade or shopper marketing dollars. Brands should be eager to leverage retailer ecosystems to drive maximum returns. Retail media strategies should align with a full-funnel marketing approach, and brands should capitalize on top-of-funnel opportunities before the holiday season. It’s not necessary for brands to deploy media tactics across the entire funnel simultaneously to be effective. Instead, the key is to focus on different stages of the funnel during peak and off-peak times to optimize returns.

Get ahead of customer considerations before holiday campaigns

This is the time of the year to run awareness and consideration campaigns to get the brand in front of consumers while they begin to build their consideration set. Brands will want to be top of mind while shoppers are in mid to low buying time frame and begin their research for holiday sales. This also allows the time for brands gain traction with their ideal target audience. They can test and learn different messaging and evaluate performance in different retailer ecosystems.

Lean into retailer promotional calendars and messaging

Retailers know their target audience and core customers best. So partnering with them to align yourself with their seasonal calendar and messaging can be a key differentiator to stand out amongst competition. Retailers also appreciate it when brands are leaning into centralized messaging as it maximizes their returns as well. Brands should request retailers’ promotional calendar timelines and any key messaging they plan to use during peak seasons. Integrating this information into their own campaigns can enhance alignment and effectiveness.

More is not always better for holiday and promotional campaign strategies

Holiday and promotional seasons have more advertising activity than ever. This can be overwhelming to the consumer and often wasteful for brands blindly spending to be competitive. Spending more during this time frame can be a way to beat competition, but it’s imperative to not spend blindly. Prior to holiday peak season, brands should evaluate past campaign successes, top performing ad units, keywords and messages. Once peak season has arrived, brands will be prepared to spend wisely on priority SKUs leveraging wins from the past.

As the holiday season nears, brands should prepare to enhance their retail media presence. Rather than pulling back on fall spending, focus on full-funnel strategies, leveraging top-of-funnel opportunities before the holidays. Run awareness and consideration campaigns now to get in front of consumers early. Align with retailers’ promotional calendars and messaging to boost effectiveness. Finally, avoid overspending by evaluating past campaign successes and investing wisely in high-performing areas. Marketers that take these steps to prepare for peak season will be better positioned to maximize the ROI of their holiday retail media strategy.

Learn how Rithum can help.

Meghan Barden is director of global retail media at Rithum.

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