Tesco Media and Insights Platform, the retail media business launched by British supermarket giant Tesco back in 2021, announced a number of updates to its offering at its Upfronts presentation this week, including the addition of video ads to the Tesco website and app.
Tesco hasn’t released many specifications around the video format, other than saying it will run “short-form video content”. Images at the Upfront presentation showed video ads appearing at the top of the search results page, where display banner ads may also appear.
Alongside the video ads announcement, Tesco Media unveiled a new measurement framework, which it says is designed to demonstrate the full-funnel impact of retail media campaigns. The supermarket says the new framework, built in collaboration with advertisers, agencies, and industry bodies, draws on a range of solutions to measure impacts throughout the funnel, with omnichannel attribution set for launch next year.
Tesco is also spinning up a new insights portal within its offering for ad targeting and personalisation, which will include expanded audience segments delivered through dunnhumby’s (the tech company which powers Tesco Media and Insights Platform) Sphere platform.
Beyond sponsored search
There are plenty of stats showing the rapid growth of retail media. Recent figures from IAB Europe show retail media spending in Europe grew by 22 percent in 2023, much higher than the growth rate of the overall ad market which sat at six percent. Total European retail media spending is projected to hit €31 billion by 2028.
But a lot of this spending is still focussed on sponsored search products within ecommerce platforms, where brands pay to have their brand appear prominently within a search based on keyword targeted, or else on banner ads which sit around the edge of an ecommerce interface.
These formats, particularly sponsored search, tend to be performance based. But as Tesco’s launch of a full-funnel measurement framework shows, retailers are keen to demonstrate that their media businesses can deliver on upper funnel objectives too.
Tesco clearly sees video ads as a way of delivering on brand building metrics, saying that the new format “enables advertisers to deliver more engaging brand stories to shoppers”. The supermarket added that video advertising “now [sees] significantly higher engagement than traditional broadcast media among 16-34 year-olds” – though broadcasters would undoubtedly contest that claim, and whether video ads within an ecommerce store would generate as much engagement as video ads on a dedicated video app is unclear.
