Sean Crawford, Managing Director for North America, spoke to The Drum’s Kendra Barnett about the future of commerce media and why the travel and transportation sectors are poised to win.
“It’s really just commerce media,” Sean told The Drum when asked about the evolving retail media landscape, which includes recent noteworthy entries from the likes of Chase, PayPal, United Airlines, Marriot, Expedia, Uber and Lyft.
“It’s anything where a customer transacts with an institution or an organization … as long as you have a strong database that is … compliant [with privacy regulations], you have a good audience of endemic brands that you can target and you have a really strong base to build a network off the back of, which can then attract non-endemic [brands] as well,” he said.
Why are these non-retailers getting in on commerce media, a space so-far dominated by retailers like Amazon and Walmart?
“Because retailers have [succeeded], you’ve now got the wider industry jumping on that bandwagon and going, ‘We have all this data … How can we work with partners to make our customer experience richer, while also ultimately making ourselves more profitable by selling that data?’” he told The Drum.
Not everyone entering this space will have success, Sean say, adding: “[Commerce] media has to be additive, it has to be something that enhances the customer experience. And that can be done really well in the travel space with a partnership model between things that make sense when you’re in that travel mindset.”