Why advertisers are betting on retailers like Walmart and CVS
The pandemic has been a boon to marketers that sell essential items and invested early in e-commerce. And it’s also been a boon to retailers like Walmart and Target that realized they could use their sites to sell advertising alongside packaged goods.
Patrick Coffee and Tanya Dua report that as marketers use their ad dollars to drive e-commerce, they’re looking to these retail alternatives. Key points:
Marketers are desperate to find alternatives to the all-powerful Amazon, with its byzantine ad sales structure, fees, and sheer dominance.
Places like eBay, CVS, and Instacart have opened for advertising business in recent years and are seen as having advantages over Amazon, like service, big store footprints, and neutral selling platforms.
They might not be toppling Amazon off its perch just yet, but the longer the pandemic drags on, the more likely people’s shift to online shopping — and advertiser’s new habits — are likely to stick.
The biggest losers? Traditional media like TV, whose viewership is declining and that aren’t performance-driven like commerce platforms.
David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images for Amazon
Twitch’s ad push
People are starting to accept that gamers aren’t a monolithic group of young guys in their parents’ basement.
Lauren Johnson got ahold of slides from a new pitch deck Amazon is taking out to advertisers as it ramps up ad sales on its live-streaming platform, Twitch.
Amazon wants advertisers to know, among other things, that Twitch users are largely over 18 (presumably with money to spend) and are interested in lots of other things (They watch TV! They cook!)
Ad agency work is notorious for grinding down people early in their careers and its lack of job stability. It’s only gotten worse in the pandemic, when agencies have laid off thousands as clients have gutted their budgets.
So you’d think agencies would be fertile ground for labor unions, which have already had success organizing digital media editorial workers.
This is despite the fact that their work, like agencies, can be rift with internal competition and frequent job changes, factors that could be seen as working against a successful organizing effort. For that matter, few if any US agencies have unions.
It’s worth remembering that unions helped set standards for pay and layoffs procedures at digital media companies but weren’t necessarily able to save jobs from the economic pressures falling on the industry.
