At the beginning of this century, there were the traditional advertising media. They were the ones who took the big advertising revenue. Television was the great queen, but the other media also got their share. Then the audiences migrated. The Internet was growing overwhelmingly and consumers began to spend more and more time in that space.
If consumers were on the internet, advertisers wanted to be too, so they launched into those new platforms. Google was, little by little, building its empire. But then came the new variation of advertising: the important thing was not just the audiences and the time they spent on those platforms, but also the data.
The strongest rival was the one who could know the audiences better and the one who managed to segment them much better. The success of Google and Facebook was based on that, but also that of the rising stars. Amazon has been positioning itself in the advertising market because it has become the default home page for consumers to find information to make purchases online, but also because it has a lot of data on audiences.
However, this interest in data and its growing importance in the advertising market will not only establish ‘better’ the reign of existing players in the advertising universe. It also opens the door for new players to position themselves and to make cash with the information they have. Walmart , the longtime American giant of hypermarkets, was one of the first to try to follow in the wake of Amazon and take advantage of the advertising reef. It is no longer the only one.
The competition to sell advertising has overflowed. It is good news for advertisers, but very bad for the usual players, such as the media.
Everybody wants to cash
Thus, as reflected in Axios , now that the advertising market is again high growth rates, companies of all kinds are trying to gain market announcements and take one portion of the pie. The fight is no longer between media and tech giants, but increasingly between all companies with a certain digital presence and all the players that already existed.
Everyone wants to leverage their data and everyone wants to sell ad space and monetize. The latest move by Instacart , one of America’s most popular delivery brands, points in that direction. The company has just hired one of the directors of Facebook’s advertising team to be its CEO and to build its advertising offer.
It is not the only delivery company that has seen the reef. Instacart’s other two US competitors, Doordash and Gopuff , would also be building their advertising environment. The same is being done in that market by the retail giants (such as Walmart or Target), the main supermarket chains and even the pharmacy chains.
All of them sell different advertising formats and different potential applications, but each and every one of them seeks to take income from the post-pandemic advertising boom. So much so, that analysts believe that in 2021 not only will advertising spending rise above expectations, but the offer of advertising players will also become more diverse.
That is, there will be more advertising revenue, but also more players trying to get hold of them. The Axios data may be from the US market, but it does not seem unreasonable to think that this trend will be repeated in the European market. Some online supermarkets, for example, already have ads.