Why Sam’s Club is overhauling its ad network with a self-service platform to compete in the retail media race

By Marty Swant

As retailers increasingly invest in ways to let advertisers reach consumers on their online properties, Sam’s Club is the latest to give its ad network a major overhaul.

The Walmart-owned company today is rolling out a number of updates across its website, app and curbside pickup e-commerce options. Along with giving online shopping new search capabilities, Sam’s Club will now let advertisers buy sponsored product ads through a self-service platform called the Membership Access Platform (MAP) to target shoppers based on search behavior, past purchases and membership info. Marketers will also be able to retarget people off Sam’s Club’s platforms through programmatic ad partnerships with The Trade Desk, IRI and LiveRamp.

Sam’s Club debuted an ads business in 2009 that was insourced from another company, but it hasn’t had any major updates since the Covid-19 pandemic, according to Lex Josephs, Sam’s Club vp of ad sales and general manager. She said shoppers are searching for products “more than ever,” but until now there hasn’t been a search experience online for their customers. The company’s membership model also gives advertisers first-party data that helps them understand the lifetime value of a customer and also helps to trace what they’re searching for and buying both online and offline.

“Because it’s 100% traceable tender where everything is related back to a credit card, you know everything about a member,” said Josephs, who joined Sam’s Club in January after spending four years on the ad sales team at Walmart. “That then gives us a way to curate a really curated personalized experience.”

Although she wouldn’t say which advertisers have been a part of the new platform, Josephs said they began onboarding them about a month ago. (Walmart has its own media network, but she said it’s very separate from Sam’s Club’s data.) Other data partners beyond the initial three could also be added in over time.

Retail media is indeed a booming business. In the U.S. alone, retail media ad sales are expected to climb 39% from $29 billion in 2021 to $40 billion in 2022, according to Forrester, which predicts that could double to $85 billion by 2026. And as reaching consumers via the set-to-expire third-party cookie becomes less popular — and less effective — advertisers are looking to find new ways of reaching consumers beyond traditional search and social media.

It’s all about advertisers getting closer to consumers’ point of purchase, said Sarah Hofstetter, president of the Publicis-owned e-commerce monitoring platform Profitero. However, the new places for spending ad dollars also come with a new wave of walled gardens.

“I think of it like Game of Thrones,” Hofstetter said. “Who’s got which dominion at the moment.”

Although Amazon has had the lead for years, competition is heating up. In March, Walmart announced updates to its own offerings and even disclosed ad revenue for the first time to the tune of $2.1 billion in 2021. That’s still just a fraction of the $31 billion in ad revenue that Amazon reported last year.

In January, Best Buy launched its …read more

Source:: Digiday