As Retail Media continues to grow, more and more retailers are adding support for display ads and shoppable videos on their e-commerce sites. These forms of advertising are a great complement to existing search and sponsored product based support. They lend themselves well to creating brand awareness and engaging potential shoppers, especially on mobile devices, where visual forms of content like images and videos are far easier to digest than text. Yet although the sites themselves may support video, many retailers face a challenge when it comes to getting advertisers to run campaigns that require image or video based creative. Smaller advertisers lack in-house creative resources, while larger advertisers often face backlogged creative departments that don’t have the bandwidth to produce images, videos and display ads on the schedules required for e-commerce.

That’s why sites like Instacart have partnered with It’sRapid to offer a combination of self-serve and managed service creative solutions to their advertisers. The right Retail Media Creative Platform can not only accelerate time to market for new creative, but also unlock additional advertising opportunities, such as occasion-based and seasonal refreshes that advertisers may previously have found difficult to execute on due to limited creative resources.

• Retailer Templates. A Retail Media Creative Platform supports templates in all the sizes that are needed for campaigns on the retailer’s retail media network. These templates can include elements such as headlines, rectangles and call to action buttons, as well as room for lifestyle and product images. They can be pre-configured with specific CTAs or designed to be more flexible to allow for free-form text, depending on the retailer’s requirements. Additional templates can be easily created when new formats are added, or to support new requirements. Certain elements can be set to required (such as a logo, for example), while other elements are optional. The use of specific fonts and colors can be specified, or the choice of font and colors can be left up to the advertiser, depending on how much consistency or flexibility the retail media network wants to provide.
  
  
• Media File Exports. Retail Media Creative Platforms ensure consistency of exported creative assets. By setting specific naming conventions, file size limits, file formats and the like, a Retail Media Creative Platform can ensure that all delivered files adhere to the necessary requirements for creative to go live. Using the It’sRapid Banner Builder, for example, can significantly reduce the number of assets that need to be reworked, thereby further accelerating the speed with which campaigns can be launched.
• Stock Images. While some brands have lifestyle shots available, many want to take advantage of stock images to enhance their display creative, or to update that creative for seasonal opportunities throughout the year. Retail Media Creative Platforms like It’sRapid come with a library of stock images that advertisers can make use of when building their creative.
• Digital Asset Management. Another benefit of using a Retail Media Creative platform is that advertisers can store their creative assets, so if they want to launch a new campaign later in the year, they can easily start with the assets they created for a previous campaign as a jumping off point. This further accelerates the process of getting new creative designed and launched.
• Product Image Import. Retail Media Platforms like It’sRapid can import product images directly from e-commerce web sites, or from feeds from e-commerce platforms like Shopify, PIM systems like Salsify, or existing Digital Asset Management Systems.This means that advertisers have easy access to product images to incorporate into their display creative.

But perhaps the most significant benefit of all of a Retail Media Creative Platform is that it lets advertisers build creative themselves, via a self-serve portal, while retailers can ensure that the resulting creative adheres to retailer style guidelines and delivery requirements. 

To find out more about how we enable retailers like Instacart to accelerate time to launch for retail media creative, please contact us!