The holidays bring peak revenue and peak pressure. Competition spikes, margins compress, and speed becomes the difference between capitalizing on demand or missing it entirely. Retail media networks (RMNs) should be a high-margin channel for retailers during this window, but slow audience activation, excessive onboarding fees, and operational drag quietly erode profit when retailers need efficiency most.
A Composable CDP, or Customer Data Platform, with an embedded data onboarding solution improves the entire process. By connecting audience data directly to the warehouse, resolving identities, and activating audiences without heavy integrations or standalone data onboarders, retailers can move faster, capture more revenue, and retain more margin during the most critical season of the year.
Launch a new audience in minutes, not days or weeks
For many retail media networks, audience building is bottlenecked by data access. Many retail media networks depend on data and engineering teams to explore opportunities, size audiences, and build lists, leaving them without the ownership or visibility needed to move at holiday speed.
And as retail media networks move from onsite to offsite ad channels, the slowdown grows. Retail media networks typically have to pass audience data between data storage platforms, CDPs, and onboarders before it ever gets to the ad platforms where the campaigns are run.
To get an audience from its source to its final destination, a typical workflow for a retail media network looks like this:
- Send data from their source of truth (e.g. a data warehouse) to their standalone CDP through rigid integrations or manual uploads
- Create audiences in their CDP and sync them to a data onboarder like LiveRamp to enhance match rates
- Wait for the data onboarder to ingest the audience data and match it to their identity graph, which can take 2-3 days
- Create and sync the audience that the onboarder has enriched to the ad platforms
- Wait for the audience to process and build in the ad platform, which can take another 1-3 days
Each handoff adds multiple days to the process, and by the time audiences are finally live, the campaign opportunity may have slipped away.
The composable fix:
By connecting directly to your warehouse, a Composable CDP gives marketers access to complete company data. Teams can segment audiences, size them, and refine them on their own, moving from idea to audience delivery in minutes instead of days or weeks.
If the CDP provides an embedded data onboarding solution like Hightouch does, it can also replace the need to pass data to an external data onboarding platform, where it traditionally has to be re-ingested and re-activated. This cuts out additional operational steps and multiple days of delays.
Reduce the high operational overhead and cost of managing multiple vendors
Not only is the process described above time-consuming, but juggling data warehouses, CDPs, standalone data onboarders, and ad platforms requires inflexible integrations, frequent troubleshooting, and dependencies on engineering and data teams – all of which increase operational costs and complexity. Managing a retail media network this way is hard to do, and even harder to scale.
The composable fix:
With a warehouse-connected Composable CDP, the entire chain collapses. Data no longer has to move from the warehouse, into a CDP, out to an onboarder, and finally to an ad platform.
Instead, marketers build audiences in the CDP directly on top of complete warehouse data. And data onboarding happens in-flight as the audience is delivered from the warehouse directly to ad platforms, eliminating the need for a standalone onboarder entirely.
The result is a leaner, faster system where operational overhead falls away, and teams spend their time selling, developing, and launching new retail media campaigns instead of maintaining plumbing.
Eliminate targeting taxes and marketplace fees that eat into your margins
Most retail media networks rely on data onboarding platforms like LiveRamp to improve match rates and expand audience reach. But while onboarders have a strong positive impact on revenue by increasing the half-life of campaigns and maximizing the number of billable impressions, they also often quietly erode margins by charging retailers twice for the same audiences – first through SaaS “records under management” fees for onboarding, and again when those audiences are actually activated.
Here’s how the double charge plays out in DSP marketplaces. DSPs already take ~15% for listing and activating retailer audiences. Because onboarders also operate competing marketplaces, they impose their own marketplace fee on top, effectively doubling costs (e.g., from 15% to 30%) just to sell an audience.
Similarly, to use those audiences on SSPs for Programmatic Guaranteed (PG) deals or CTV platforms and Publisher Direct destinations for direct insertion orders (IOs), platforms like LiveRamp also charge outdated “targeting taxes” by adding duplicative CPM fees.
Retail media networks have two options when they want to run campaigns through SSPs or direct channels: increase their own CPM fees to compensate, or maintain competitive rates and let their margins take another hit.
In short, if you’re running campaigns through DSP marketplaces, SSPs, or direct channels, you’re handing over duplicative fees to traditional onboarding platforms – on top of the fees you already pay them for data onboarding.
The composable fix:
By replacing traditional onboarders like LiveRamp with a modern solution like Hightouch, you can eliminate marketplace markups and targeting taxes entirely. Rejecting this kind of rent-seeking behavior ensures retail media networks can offer competitive offsite media rates to their advertising partners while protecting their hard-earned margins, reducing fees by 50% or more.
The bottom line
In a season where every hour and every dollar counts, retailers can’t afford slow processes, siloed tools, or excessive taxes on their media revenue. A Composable CDP with an embedded onboarding solution gives retail media networks the speed, simplicity, and cost-efficiency needed to protect margins when the stakes are highest. By unifying data access, audience building, and onboarding in one warehouse-native workflow, retailers finally gain a modern, scalable foundation for high-margin retail media, during the holidays and long after.
If you found this helpful, you may also want to explore the other two posts in this series:
- How smart retailers protect holiday profit: Plugging costly LTV leaks
- How smart retailers protect holiday profit: Reducing waste in paid media
Together, they outline the full picture of where retailers lose (and gain) the most margin, and how a modern, Composable CDP approach helps you enter the next holiday season with a foundation built to win.
If you’re ready to see how this could work for you, book a Hightouch demo. We’ll walk through your current workflow and share how you can join leading retailers in powering scalable, high-margin retail media networks.
