'Commerce media gives us a perspective on how we shape our business'

At the e4m-Xaxis Programmatic Summit, a panel of experts came together to discuss 'Commerce media: past, present and future of a fast-growing media opportunity.' Suyash Dongre, Head of Digital Marketing, VIP Industries; Sonali Malaviya, Managing Director, Essence India; Varadharanjan Ragunathan, Head- Monetization & customer engagement, Big Basket; Avinash Janjire VP & Head - Marketing, Thomas Cook; and Ankur Rathi, Head- DSP GTM Amazon were part of the esteemed panel. 

Dippak Khurana co-founder & CEO, Vserv & Vmax moderated the session. He started by broaching the topic of commerce media. He told the audience that as consumers are ahead and they are spending more and more time on buying, commerce platforms are becoming media platforms. "Selling to brand is becoming an interesting area for commerce platforms. Brands, on other hand, are interested in using commerce platforms as media platforms", Khurana added. 

"After the pandemic, e-commerce is now becoming mainstream. It is the part of the most discussed plans, from a brand's perspective," said Ragunathan. He thinks that the future is going to be a mixture of psychology and technology. Using human psychology and technology together will help e-commerce platforms to differentiate from others.

Rathi said, "Any commerce platform, including Amazon, has established a very clear matrix on enabling discovery. The demand is already getting catered to, and we are also catering for discovery. For any marketer or any buyer, the way they look at Amazon or any e-commerce platform is very important." 

Talking about how brands try to leverage the increased demands on e-commerce platforms, Dongre noted, "Commerce media gives us a perspective of how we shape our business. It gives us a perspective on what we should produce next. We get various answers from the commerce media and that's how we hold relevance from e-commerce platforms."

Janjire spoke about lessons from Amazon while setting up Thomas Cook's ecomm presence: "Because of the advent of the digital and e-commerce platforms, we started building our e-commerce about 5-6 years ago. That is when we looked at the concept of Amazon. It is the fastest way to get to a relevant and aligned purchase audience. Because of various data cards and segmentations, there is a huge overlap between my audience and we were able to give the cohorts of frequent travellers per e- purchase, and mode of the purchases. Our intent was not to sell but to acquire a new set of customers which are primarily online buyers."

Malaviya shared that the marketplaces are a fairly recent entry into the media mix. "As lower funnel contributors, they have a very important role and that is how the business understands and naturally takes them, but as an upper funnel or when we go through the funnel, that is a recent consideration. Audiences are no longer linear, and audiences' journeys are no longer linear. Platform thinking is something of the past. Past, was all about thinking when the media was linear, today is a lot more dynamic. Today's are a lot more audience focused and the future is going to be even more so, powered by a lot more data and unification of that journey. We are still away from something which is integrating and Omnichannel, Omnicommerce, all of that is on the way, it's not there yet," she explained.