Commerce media: how to tell if you have an opportunity

Most businesses treat their customer base as the source of the next sale. A growing number are starting to treat it as a source of revenue in its own right, by selling advertisers access to their audience.

Retailers like Currys and John Lewis are highly prized media partners because they offer something advertisers have always wanted: insight into who is actually in the market based on what millions of customers search, browse and buy.

UK digital retail media is forecast to reach £8.6bn by 2030, growing at an average of 17% a year from 2024 (IAB UK Futurescape). What has changed is that you no longer need to be a retailer to take part.

What is commerce media, and how does it differ from retail media?

Retail media is advertising sold by retailers. Commerce media applies the same model to any business that sits close to a transaction. Financial services, travel, telecoms, delivery, comparison and ticketing all hold large customer relationships and see commercial signals that look a lot like the ones retailers monetise.

Confused.com is a great example of what that looks like in practice. Its media proposition, Connect, gives brands access to its comparison-shopping audiences across connected TV, online video, display and audio.

But Confused.com is not selling space on its own site. It is taking what it learns when someone compares car, home, pet or travel insurance, and making that audience addressable available to all kinds of brands across thousands of publishers and streaming platforms, using anonymised signals matched through Epsilon CORE Identity.

Let’s take someone who has gone through the car insurance journey. Knowing whether a customer drives an electric or petrol car turns "car owner" into a much sharper, higher-value segment. For energy suppliers, EV owners are strong candidates for EV tariffs, smart meters and home batteries. For automotive brands, it separates people who need charging equipment and home installation from those who need conventional servicing and fuel-related offers.

It's also a useful proxy for affluence and homeownership, given EV ownership skews toward higher income and off-street parking. And it flags prospects too. An petrol driver showing signs of an upcoming change is a real target for EV and energy brands looking to win them over early.

What does a business need to be valuable to advertisers?

Here are seven questions to ask of your business to determine if you are sitting on a media opportunity.

1. Do you have enough audience to be worth buying? Advertisers need reach to justify the effort of a new media partner. Scale on its own is not sufficient, but without it nothing else matters.
2. Do your customers give you intent signals, not just visits? Someone requesting a quote, booking a holiday, comparing cars or making a payment is telling you something. Someone loading a page is not. Signal strength matters more than database size.
3. How recent is what you know? Frequent interactions keep the picture current. Businesses that see customers rarely can still qualify if they catch them at unusually valuable moments, but you need to know which of the two you are.
4. Is your audience genuinely different from what advertisers can already buy? Knowing someone likes cars is available everywhere. Knowing they are comparing cars, arranging finance and pricing insurance this month is not. If your data only tells advertisers what broad interest targeting already tells them, they will not pay a premium for it.
5. Can advertisers reach your customers off your own property? This is where most propositions stall. If brands can only reach your audience while it is on your site or app, your inventory is capped by your own traffic and by how much advertising you can reasonably show. Offsite activation across the open web, online video and connected TV removes that ceiling.
6. Can you recognise the same customer across devices, sites and channels, accurately and at scale? Advertisers find out quickly which audiences match reliably and which look valuable in theory but fall apart in activation.
7. Can you prove what happened afterwards? If you can see a purchase, booking, quote or visit following exposure, the proposition becomes concrete. If you cannot connect the two, you are asking advertisers to take your audience on trust.

Where to start with commerce media as a revenue opportunity

Start by establishing your audience has something distinct to offer advertisers.

In retail, a grocer like Iceland sees the same customers weekly and holds a continuous read on household behaviour, while Wickes sees them rarely but catches them mid-renovation when spend is concentrated and intent is unambiguous.

Once you are confident the audience is genuinely differentiated, it’s time to determine whether you can sell it. Offsite reach lifts the ceiling on how much inventory there is in the first place. Identity is what lets an advertiser recognise the same person on a publisher site, on connected TV and back again. Measurement can then close the loop from impression through to sale, so advertisers are shown what happened instead of being asked to assume it.

Epsilon resolves identity on persistent, deterministic signals, so one person with four email addresses is treated as one customer and not four, which is what makes offsite reach and closed-loop measurement possible at the same time.

The consent and governance side sits alongside this. Advertisers will ask how customer data is being used, and so will your own legal and brand teams.

Find out what building a network actually involves

Epsilon builds and runs retail media networks for retailers and commerce media propositions for businesses outside retail, covering onsite and offsite inventory, identity, activation and closed-loop measurement.

If you are working out whether your customer data is a media business, that conversation is a useful place to test the answer.