What Is The Difference Between Onsite & Offsite Retail Media & What Are The Benefits Of Each?

Onside retail media is the earliest form of retail media and this is basically the idea that retailer would deliver an ad on their website or within their app as it would be and it’s very close to the point of purchase right someone’s about to buy something and so on it started out with mostly product listing ads which were essentially Somebody went in search for a product and you showed a list of products but you notice some of them say sponsored those advertisers are paying for their listing to appear above the other products that are shown right so that’s predominantly where retail media was then the retailers started ining richer formats like banner ads and video but quickly they found out there wasn’t a lot of space to put a banner ad and they didn’t want it to be interruptive to the purchasing experience and so mostly for those formats retailers have decided that those should be run offsite what does that mean it’s an ad that’s run on any other website but powered by the same data that the retailer has which is where the Precision of the message and the product and so on comes there are a couple of benefits so on-site retail media is close to the point of purchase right so someone’s searching for something and they’re about to buy something what better time than to deliver a relevant ad to them right so it has the benefit of sort of the immediacy of being in the path to purchase so to speak however most on-site ads are just search ads meaning that they’re responsive to whatever search the user entered but they often don’t factor in past purchases or for that matter in store purchases so if you went to a store and you bought something the on-site ad doesn’t necessarily factor that in whereas offsite ads often are powered by the retailers data which could be data from their physical stores as well as from their online purchases so the data is much richer but so is the ad format offsite ads are much richer and immersive and you can have banner ads you can have video ads you can have CTV ads you can have ads on social platforms like meta and YouTube and so on so as an Advertiser you have a much richer canvas to play in and yet you get the benefits of the retailers data for the Precision so instore Commerce media is an interesting Evolution right so the initial proposition of retail media and commerce media was try to deliver an ad right at the point of purchase right now of course online that was easy to do when a user went and search for a product you serve them an ad either of the types of products they’re trying to buy or a competitor’s product Etc so now when you start thinking of all the people for most retailers who buy in physical stores 80 to 90% of them how do you replicate that experience right at the point of purchase well many retailers saying what if we put up screens in the stores along the aisles and deliver relevant ads at the point of purchase so someone walks into a store they think they buying sour cream or something like that well why not you know put an ad for bagels or something like right so that’s becoming quite popular to try to replicate the idea that you deliver an ad at the point of purchase right so that’s why inore retail media is about putting ads within the stores on special displays and again trying to be as relevant to the consumer as possible inar is a little bit more challenging because it it’s very it’s difficult to make it personalized right so when you’re walking into an aisle you’re not the only one walking into that aisle so how do they make sure you get the ad you want that you should be getting and so on so there are interesting things being done like special offers or reminding you to go to another aisle to look at this Brand’s product I even heard recently from a cpg brand that actually in the ads will put a QR code that the consumer can go and just scan right and when they scan that then the display shows other uh content or other related products and so on so they’re trying to get from just one ad for everyone who walks by that aisle to more personalized experiences but you know uh it’s not quite the same as what you can do onsite and offsite outside of the stores