For most business, the commercial model has always been fairly straightforward: have a good product, sell it, and grow the customer base. What we’re beginning to see more businesses do is look at that customer base differently, not just as the source of the next sale, but as something that could create a new source of the revenue in its own right.
Retailers like Currys and John Lewis are highly prized media partners largely because of the information generated when millions of customers search, browse and buy. That gives them something advertisers have always wanted: a better idea of who is actually in the market for what.
Retail media has grown rapidly around that idea. IAB UK expects UK retail media spend to reach £8.6bn by 2030, growing at an average annual rate of 17% from 2024.
What’s interesting now is that you don’t necessarily need to be a retailer to monitise your data this way and tap incremental revenue.
Commerce media takes the same basic model into business such as financial services, travel and other sectors with large customer relationships and useful commercial signals. eMarketer expects US non-retail commerce media to grow at 34.1% annually between 2025 and 2028, compared with 16.2% for traditional retail media.
So what does a business need to have for this model to make sense?
First and foremost, there needs to be an audience that advertisers would actually pay to reach. Scale helps because advertisers need enough reach to justify the investment, but a huge customer database isn’t necessarily enough on its own.
What those customers tell you through their interactions can be just as important. Someone requesting a quote, booking a holiday, comparing cars or making a payment is giving a much stronger signal of intent than someone simply visiting a webpage. Frequent interactions can also help because the information is more recent, but some businesses might see customers less often and catch them at particularly valuable moments.
Then there’s the slightly more abstract question: what makes your audience different?
Advertisers already have plenty of ways to reach broad demographic and interest groups, so there needs to be a reason they would pay to reach yours. Knowing someone is interested in cars is one thing. Knowing they are currently comparing cars, arranging finance or buying insurance tells you considerably more about what might be happening in their life.
Having that insight is only half the job, though, because advertisers need to be able to do something with it.
If brands can only reach your customers while they are on your website or app, the opportunity is limited by how many people are there and how much advertising you can reasonably show them offsite media gets around that constraint by allowing those audiences to be reached elsewhere, across websites, online video, connected TV and other digital channels.
That means being able to recognise your customers as they move between different devices, sites and channels, and doing that with both scale and accuracy, Not all identity is equal, and advertisers will quickly recognise the difference between an audience that can be matched confidently and one that looks valuable in theory but is hard to activate in practice. It also means having the right consent and controls around how customer data is used, and being able to measure what happens after someone sees the advertising.
Measurement is particularly important for businesses that can see a meaningful outcome, whether that is a purchase, booking, quote, visit or another commercial action. Being able to connect advertising exposure with something that happened afterwards makes the proposition much more tangible for the advertiser.
None of this means every company with plenty of customers is sitting on an untapped media business. Some audiences will be too generic, others will be difficult to reach at sufficient scale, and sometimes advertisers simply won’t value the signals enough.
But there are businesses outside retail sitting on large customer relationships and unusually good indications of what people want, need or intend to do next. Until fairly recently, there wasn’t much reason to think of those relationships as an advertising proposition. Commerce media gives businesses with the right ingredients a reason to start looking at them differently.
Epsilon is a global data, technology and services company that powers the marketing and advertising ecosystem. The world’s leading brands use Epsilon to harmonise consumer engagement across their paid, owned and earned channels, leveraging capabilities that include data, identity resolution, customer data platforms, clean rooms, digital media, retail media, site personalisation, direct mail, loyalty, email marketing and measurement. By applying artificial intelligence against privacy-centric consumer recognition–embedded in data-enriched analytic, marketing and media solutions – Epsilon allows marketers to bridge the divide between marketing and advertising technology, engaging consumers with 1 View, 1 Vision and 1 Voice. 1 View of their universe of potential buyers. 1 Vision for engaging each individual. And 1 Voice to harmonise engagement across paid, owned and earned channels. For more information, visit www.epsilon.com.
