TMW #202 | The Sleeping Giants of Marketing

Nov 24, 2024

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Welcome to The Martech Weekly, where every week I review some of the most interesting ideas, research, and latest news. I look to where the industry is going and what you should be paying attention to.

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Financial institutions sniff an opportunity amongst signal loss, but can they capitalize on it to become a cornerstone of the marketing industry?

For the sake of brevity, I use the term financial institution quite liberally in this piece to refer to things like banks, credit unions, and neobanks as well as payment facilitators like PayPal and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) companies. Where necessary, I delineate between each type.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) are locked together in an awkward tango over Google’s third-party cookie (3PC) deprecation plans. One step towards deprecation addresses the ICO’s consumer privacy concerns, but heightens the CMA’s fears that Google will use 3PC deprecation to entrench its dominance in digital advertising via its cookie alternative, the Privacy Sandbox. A step back or delay makes neither happy.

But never fear, because the CMA has politely asked Google for an update as to their plans by year’s end! Maybe it will be different this time… maybe the end really is nigh… or maybe pigs can fly…

Marketers with at least one foot in reality aren’t holding their breath for that announcement; instead, they are looking at alternatives. One of the key alternatives is commerce media networks (CMNs), which have grown in popularity over the last two years based on the promise – as articulated by McKinsey – of making “advertising more effective by using transaction data to gain audience insights, improve targeting, deliver relevant experiences, and connect impressions to sales, online and in-store.”

It started with retail media networks (RMNs), which give brands in CPG and FMCG the chance to advertise their products right at the point of sale. RMNs are the most well-known and popular form of CMN with 240 RMNs worldwide, but the concept has spawned the lesser-known financial media network (FMN), which is starting to gain traction as a concept.

In terms of predicted ad spend over the next 3 years, FMNs look tiny compared to RMNs, right? But that calculus changes drastically if you remove Amazon as the outlier, capturing 75.2% of the total spend on retail media so the gap is not as large as it seems.

Regardless of the comparative size, financial institutions (FIs) have a massive opportunity in digital advertising – and arguably beyond that in the broader marketing discipline within enterprise consumer brands. Banks, credit unions, BNPL firms, and payment facilitators have buckets of valuable data that marketers can use to understand more about their customers, their market, and competitors. They also, of course, have digital properties that can host ads. But they also have plenty of challenges in the shape of regulation, culture, and problematic incentives.

So, can the sleeping giants of marketing wake up and become a dominant force in the digital marketing ecosystem?

Stay Curious,

Keanu Taylor

Make sense of marketing technology.

Want to share something interesting or be featured in The Martech Weekly? Drop me a line at juan@themartechweekly.com.