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10 minutes of expert insights every weekday. Your morning ritual for staying ahead in retail media.
I downloaded the data Amazon has on me. It’s not just about shopping
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[00:00:00] Kiri Masters: A couple of weeks ago, I was in the mood to be shocked and weirded out. But instead of turning to my usual temptations, YouTube and Reddit, I decided to request all the data that Amazon has [00:00:15] filed on me as a consumer, including which audience segments I'm in, my ad conversion events, and the like. The shock came when tallying the amount of money that I've spent on Amazon over the past [00:00:30] fifteen years. But the ad targeting data that I leafed through was pretty humdrum. My clicks file ran to about four hundred ads, and it was all in my usual categories: coffee, [00:00:45] camping, activewear.
[00:00:47] No real surprises there. But there was one file called Advertiser Audiences that really got my attention, in this file, Pfizer, Geico, Emirates Airlines, [00:01:00] Chase, McDonald's, Westpac, which is an Australian bank. None of those companies sell anything on Amazon. All of them were holding me in advertising audiences, and the file was nearly the same size as the clicks file with [00:01:15] just under four hundred companies in total So I might have a little bit of an unusual pattern as a consumer given that until very recently I lived in the US.
[00:01:26] I took a long holiday in Europe over the summer. I moved back [00:01:30] to Australia just a few weeks ago. And so Amazon has actually got me split across three regional exports. The European one contains a single recorded ad click, which is when I was [00:01:45] looking to purchase a gift for an Airbnb host. But it also contains ninety-two non-endemic advertiser audiences, all presumably developed during just those couple of days that I was shopping on Amazon's [00:02:00] France marketplace.
[00:02:02] So this piece today isn't a privacy complaint. I'm of the view that advertising pays for a lot of services that I use, and I would personally rather advertising [00:02:15] be relevant
[00:02:16] But seeing this list of company names in my own file sent me looking for how far along non-endemic advertising really is. Now, this piece was originally published to my column
[00:02:29] [00:02:30] atthedrum dot com on August 11th
[00:02:32] Let's jump in
[00:02:33]
[00:02:34] Kiri Masters: So first up, why are non-endemic brands choosing retail media? The non-endemic story has been building within retail media for a [00:02:45] while. Dr. Cohen Powles is a professor at Northeastern University and was previously a senior ad scientist at Amazon. Writing in his personal newsletter way back in June 2025 on why expensive ads convert [00:03:00] poorly on platform, he offered this little tidbit.
[00:03:03] Marketers of high-margin products are willing to pay a lot for ads that don't immediately convert as they help the consumer along the purchase journey. This was my experience with non-endemic [00:03:15] ads at Amazon. For example, high-margin vehicles and hospitality services.
[00:03:20] And so while Amazon doesn't publish a breakdown of its split between endemic and non-endemic ad revenue, but across the broader ecosystem, [00:03:30] US offsite retail media ad spending will reach seventeen point oh five billion dollars in twenty twenty-six, up thirty percent year over year per eMarketer forecasts.
[00:03:41] And eMarketer senior analyst Sarah Marzano [00:03:45] says that retailers who have more mature, developed retail media networks are recognizing that they might be reaching a level of saturation amongst their endemic brands.
[00:03:55] So that is what is attractive. And so the response [00:04:00] has been to go and find these advertisers who are never gonna sell through the retailer in the first place
[00:04:06] A recent example is the Home Depot's Orange Apron Media put more than 20 first-party audiences into a beta with Pinterest [00:04:15] Media Network Connect. And so that is the first social platform where brands that Home Depot doesn't stock can target Home Depot shoppers.
[00:04:25] A second one is Dick's Sporting Goods
[00:04:28] Which has a really [00:04:30] valuable audience group in its Game Changer app, its youth sports app
[00:04:35] And in an earlier interview that I did with the head of Dick's Sporting Goods Retail Media, David Young, he told me that the business is in very real and substantive [00:04:45] conversations with financial services partners
[00:04:48] And last year, Kroger Precision Marketing ran Chevrolet's Equinox EV launch through the Yahoo DSP based on grocery basket signals rather than [00:05:00] automotive buying intent.
[00:05:03] And so while attracting non-endemic advertisers is undoubtedly appealing for RMNs, it is likely a pursuit that only the most sophisticated networks can handle. [00:05:15] The IAB in the US published a really fantastic white paper called Building a More Competitive Commerce Media Ecosystem. This was a few months back, and they defined six sustainable business models for the [00:05:30] future, suggesting that attracting non-endemics is only available to RMNs who are willing to scale through significant investment And they call out the fact that this business model is the best fit for networks with marketplace models, massive [00:05:45] first-party data, patience, and the willingness to invest $100 million plus over multiple years.
[00:05:52] So this kind of opportunity, tapping into financial services, travel aged care was [00:06:00] one that I was targeted for
[00:06:01] Those advertising partners are very attractive, but accessing them is not necessarily for the faint of heart Costco [00:06:15] isn't scaling its RMN with legacy ad tech and manual solutions. It's leaning into a cloud-centric composable stack. As part of the Costco Velocity Network, [00:06:30] GrowthLoop empowers the retail media team to build audiences directly from the Data Cloud, enabling faster activation, greater relevance, and better performance, all while maintaining [00:06:45] privacy and governance standards.
[00:06:47] The result? Exceptional value and experience for Costco members and better ROI for brand advertisers. Learn why the GrowthLoop Composable Commerce Media [00:07:00] Solution was the right choice for Costco's Velocity Network. Visit go.growthloop.com/breakfast. That's [00:07:15] go.growthloop.com/breakfast
[00:07:15]
[00:07:16] Kiri Masters: Now, I talked with my old colleague at the agency Acadia, Ross Walker, who is the director of retail media there, and he says the Amazon DSP for non-endemic brands story has existed for [00:07:30] years, but it really remained mostly a conference panel talking point than a widespread budget shift.
[00:07:38] But a few things have recently changed by his reading. Number one is consumer data has become [00:07:45] harder to access everywhere else. The cookies went, attribution is fragmented, and what advertisers buy from Amazon stopped resembling a retail audience and started resembling one of the world's largest commercially [00:08:00] available consumer behavior graphs.
[00:08:02] Number two is that Amazon DSP expanded its reach and efficiency through new open internet integrations, particularly across connected TV. And that makes [00:08:15] Amazon DSP more of a one-stop shop for big media budgets rather than a niche ad buy. And number three, better measurement capabilities. Non-endemics can match their own audience data against Amazon's [00:08:30] exposure logs and behavioral signals using Amazon Marketing Cloud, with a recent improvement being able to look back over five years.
[00:08:39] And this is all quite appealing and a very different value proposition from [00:08:45] the one that retail media was really pitched on as a closed loop advertising facility and that value proposition is all about proximity to the sale. A non-endemic advertiser doesn't really have a sale on a [00:09:00] retailer to get closer to
[00:09:01] and so the non-endemics don't see this as a retail media buy. They see it as a place
[00:09:06] where they can get better audience segments, great measurement And a one-stop shop media buy. So in [00:09:15] conclusion, looking at this file, which was a snapshot over seven weeks, not a complete data, data set, but it was really interesting just really in terms of how specific it was. There were [00:09:30] 42 conversion events between middle of June and early August this year.
[00:09:37] Fires
[00:09:38] these conversion events from tags sitting on other companies' websites like an airline, not on [00:09:45] Amazon. And in fact, Emirates as an airline appeared 18 times, not because I ended up buying a flight, but because I actually signed up for their membership program, and then a number of banks Hotels, [00:10:00] D2C brands
[00:10:01] Just a real eye-opener in terms of how many categories and how many companies are actually using Amazon
[00:10:07] to buy audiences or extend their reach The big appeal of retail media for most advertisers is the [00:10:15] ultimate closed loop, the proximity to the purchase. And for endemic brands, that is still the killer feature. But as that advertiser base becomes saturated, future growth is coming from advertisers with [00:10:30] no shelf presence at all.
[00:10:32] Well, that's it for today. Thanks for listening. Go download your Amazon Ads Consumer File if you're in the mood to be surprised and I'll catch you tomorrow
[00:10:43]