Advertising has gone through many changes over the few decades, from the rise of search engine marketing to social media to the new style of retail media.

Google helped pioneer search engine marketing in the late-90s and early 2000s with the introduction of their Google AdWords program. By 2007, pay-per-click programs dominated the digital advertising space.

In the late 2000s, social media platforms like Facebook began placing ads on their sites. The popularity of digital marketing amongst businesses grew, prompting social media platforms to develop their own advertising tools for purchase.

Amazon brought retail media to the forefront in recent years.

Digital advertising has mainly relied on the use of third-party data and cookies to collect and analyze user-data. However, data privacy legislation and growing consumer distrust has led to fall in third-party data collection.

This has led to the rise of first-party data collection, which uses user-provided data from email lists, loyalty programs, subscriptions and more to target ads.

With fall of TV advertising and rise of digitization, the environment is ripe for retail media networks to flourish.

According to Andrew Lipsman, principal analyst, retail and ecommerce for Insider Intelligence, “We now expect U.S. retail media marketing to grow 20% or more in 2023, reaching $45 billion. The market will continue to grow by $10 billion a year for the next few years.”

While retail media is growing, it is uphill battle to climb for many business.

Amazon owns over 77% of the retail media market share, and they aren’t expected to give much of it up anytime soon.

However, even 1% of the market represents the possibility of $450 million right now, so many companies are likely to hop on board even for a small portion of the market.

Overall, consumers should expect a shift in how they experience ads over the next five years.

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