Scale your retail media program with a one holistic, easy-to-use platform

Retail media is a thriving industry, with a US market worth $45 billion, according to a 2023 McKinsey report. To amplify brand awareness and reach new shoppers, retailers must have a deep understanding of advertiser preferences. According to a 2023 McKinsey report, offering unique value is the key strategy to attracting advertisers. The research also shows that securing, increasing, and maintaining advertising spend is contingent on retailers leveraging four key factors: delivering better performance, reaching audiences that are otherwise unreachable, showing transparent reporting, and providing omnichannel buying opportunities.

Now is the time to level-up your retail media advertising strategy. With Microsoft’s omnichannel retail media platform, our goal is to help simplify the retail advertising landscape for both advertisers and retailers.

Our strategic vision rests on three pillars: generative AI, omnichannel strategy, and leveraging the power of Microsoft.

In our two-part guide we will demonstrate how Microsoft Retail Media^* has developed a compelling value proposition, empowering retailers and advertisers to drive growth in retail media as a crucial digital advertising channel.

The hard work of managing and optimizing campaigns

From juggling multiple marketing campaigns, working with limited time and resources, leveraging ad platforms that ineffectively allocate budgets—it’s clear that advertisers need a better solution. And retailers are looking for a platform that not only empowers their large and SMB advertisers to easily create and manage campaigns, but also unlocks self-service capabilities that help generate revenue and build stronger relationships with advertisers. To enable more self-service functionality, retailers are looking for a holistic ad ecosystem that makes it easy to explain their program to advertisers, and easy for advertisers to achieve their goals.

Scalability. Simplicity. The secret to your success.

Microsoft Retail Media is committed to enabling scale and simplicity for both retailers and brands. All up, we aim to make retail media advertising more efficient and effective through innovative tools and a user-friendly design approach.

As an omnichannel platform that brings ease of doing business and creating value for retailers and advertisers, Microsoft Retail Media is focused on simplification—with design and innovation to help ease of mind. Within our platform advertisers and retailers can simplify and scale with Fast Track Campaigns and self-service tools. Plus, with Microsoft's cutting-edge generative AI technology, we are currently building more AI-driven tools to enhance the overall advertiser experience.

Introducing Fast Track Campaigns

Imagine activating retail media budgets for advertisers from Day 1. It’s possible with Microsoft Retail Media. Introducing Fast Track Campaigns, an easy-to-use tool that helps advertisers quickly get a campaign up and running.

Fast Track Campaigns allows retailers to create effective campaign templates and distribute them to their list of advertisers. This streamlined process makes it convenient for resource and time constrained advertisers to launch their next campaign. Retailers who use Fast Track Campaigns also empower first-time advertisers by providing pre-built campaign materials, enabling them to kick off collaborations with ready-made marketing assets. Plus, retailers can easily reactivate inactive ads, strengthening relationships with advertisers who may have previously paused their campaigns. By tailoring campaigns based on proven best practices, retailers enhance campaign creation efficiency. Fast Track Campaigns unlock additional retail media budgets by enabling active advertisers to create campaigns effortlessly with a single action.

Since December 2023, Fast Track Campaigns have empowered retailers to unlock over $1.4 million in budgets. 69% of the activated advertisers have been net new advertisers and 31% of the activated advertisers launched additional campaigns after receiving the first campaign from the retailer. Advertisers have also reaped significant benefits from Fast Track Campaigns by enjoying seamless product promotion and sales—in just one click—through campaigns that were not only on-brand but also analytics-driven, ensuring optimal performance by adhering to retailer best practices.

AI-powered self-service innovations to empower advertisers

Our self-service platform helps you easily promote your brands and products via in-market customers across onsite, offsite, and in-store. Plus, our AI-powered tools empower people to simplify campaign creation, creative generation, and performance optimization.

Microsoft’s retail media platform enables advertisers to promote their brand and products using first-party data. Advertisers have full control over self-service retail media activations, with real-time campaign management and reporting solutions. The platform offers flexible investment options, streamlined management, and real-time optimization, helping advertisers efficiently manage budget spend and campaign performance in real time.

We developed AI-powered self-service platform improvements to optimize the experience of retailer program owners and individual advertisers such as merchants, brand marketers, and agency managers who faced challenges managing and optimizing campaigns. Our new tools—Campaign Health Check, email notifications, and Smart Bidding were created to simplify processes and scale advertiser growth.

Campaign Health Check tells you when there are issues with your campaign, so you can solve the problem fast. By analyzing dimensions like flight date, budget, bid, SKU, and target, advertisers can diagnose issues and fine-tune campaigns for better results. Campaign health checks also empower teams to make data-driven decisions, so marketers can stay competitive.

And with email notifications, you’ll get informed in your inbox so you can make timely adjustments to improve campaign performance. Additionally,

Smart Bidding helps advertisers reduce time spent on updating their bids every day by automatically adjusting campaign bids based on Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) performance. 

Overall, our goal with these improvements is to help streamline your advertising strategy optimization at scale.

Get started today

Discover the advantages of our self-service capabilities, budgeting tools, and comprehensive reporting. Now you have the tool to help you manage and optimize your retail media investment. The Microsoft Retail Media platform is empowering retailers and advertisers to be more productive. Join us today.