Introducing Hightouch for Offsite Media Networks

The retail media landscape is getting crowded. To stand out, offsite media networks must deliver highly customized audiences for clients… and they need to do it fast.

In a recent article from Digiday, an anonymous agency executive put the problem in stark terms:

Without a way to customize audiences for each advertiser and campaign, emerging retail media networks don’t stand a chance.

To solve this problem, we are excited to announce the release of Hightouch for Offsite Media, which enables Commerce & Retail Media Networks (RMNs) to create and syndicate highly customized audiences for their advertising clients in minutes, without engineering support.

We’re launching this in partnership with Databricks, allowing joint customers to integrate powerful AI propensity models and governance capabilities through Databricks’ Data Intelligence Platform.

With Hightouch for Offsite Media, retailers can instantly deliver custom audiences to their advertising clients, helping media sellers stand out, win more advertising dollars, and command premium prices in a crowded retail media market.

Offsite media is the new frontier

Retail media networks have surged in popularity and growth… so quickly that there are now 246 retail media networks in existence, and new networks are lauching every month.

RMNs typically start by offering in-store and on-site ad placements to their marketing partners, promising to get the merchant’s products in front of buyers at the point of purchase through direct advertising relationships. However, they soon discover that in-store and onsite inventory is limited. There is a hard cap on how many ads retailers can sell based on the volume of stores, screens, and web traffic they have.

Offsite media—placing ads in channels outside of an RMNs own properties—offers virtually infinite scale by giving advertisers access to loyal retail shoppers across paid social, search, display, CTV, and more.

This realization has driven a quick rise in the number of retailers offering offsite media and the number of advertisers buying that media. According to EMarketer, 46% of advertisers say they activate offsite media when working with a retailer, and over half plan to increase their spending over the next 12 months.

But as the number of media networks grows and offsite budgets rise, competition for those advertising dollars is more intense than ever.

Standing out in a crowded retail media market

New and existing retail media networks are under pressure from all sides. The giants (Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc.) have clear advantages in data volume and traffic, allowing them to take the biggest share of RMN budgets.

At the same time, new incumbants are popping up hoping to carve out their niche with unique customer insights, loyalty, and purchase data.

Finally, offsite media networks have to contend with the same ad platforms they partner with (Meta, Google, etc.) which offer free pre-built audiences that can be accessed in minutes within their self-serve platforms.

For retailers to stand out in a sea of competitors, they need to offer advertisers truly unique audiences personalized to the needs of the client and campaign. And they need to deliver those audiences quickly so they don’t lose the deal to a competitor who moves faster.

Challenges hindering custom audience delivery

Custom audience delivery—the key to differentiation—has traditionally been a slow, resource-heavy process. Many retailers require 4-6 weeks to deliver custom audiences, involving expensive engineering resources to write custom queries on their data warehouse and deliver them as flat files or build custom data pipelines to ensure they remain fresh and comply with opt-outs.

These limitations slow down sales cycles and erode margins.

Slow and expensive custom audience delivery is typically the result of early decisions to build your offsite media network around certain vendors–like traditional CDPs or data onboarding platforms. Because the data that feeds your audiences exists elsewhere (typically in a data platform, like Databricks) this requires extensive data duplication and data movement.

Introducing Hightouch for Offsite Media Networks

Hightouch for Offsite Media Networks eliminates this complexity by bringing audience management and activation to your data, instead of the other way around. We call this unique approach a composable media network.

This approach transforms any commerce or retail company’s cloud data warehouse into a self-service audience management and activation solution for offsite media.

Build custom audiences with a self-service visual audience builder

With Hightouch, non-technical sales and media teams can build custom audiences for their advertising clients in minutes, without engineering support.

These audiences are built directly in the business's source of truth, such as Databricks or another supported cloud data warehouse, ensuring that data and media teams alike can feel confident that they are using the most accurate and up-to-date list of members.

Support unique data relationships like households, pets, or subscriptions

Unlike traditional CDPs, the audience builder supports the unique structure of your data and your business. This means that data teams don’t have to worry about conforming their existing data to a rigid data model - they simply define the relationships between data assets and Hightouch conforms to it.

For business teams, this means that they can access unique data points and build logic across unique relationships that they could not before. For example, a pet store retailer could build an audience that represents customers who own a dog with an upcoming birthday to support a personalized gift campaign for a merchant selling dog toys.

Create high-propensity and lookalike audiences using AI

Retailers can use their Data Intelligence Platform to develop powerful AI predictions and then syndicate them for use in audiences through the Hightouch platform.

With instant access to Databrick’s AI modeling capabilities, retail media teams can quickly and effectively offer up AI-powered propensity and lookalike audiences that command higher CPMs and drive better down-funnel campaign performance.

Monetize audiences across 50+ media channels

Retail media teams can instantly sync audiences across social media platforms, DSPs, ESPs, CTV channels, and marketplaces with Hightouch’s deep catalog of marketing and advertising destinations.

Support for managed service and self-service models

Hightouch supports offsite media networks that operate as managed services and well as ones that prefer to share audiences directly with their clients for self-service advertising. For example, retailers can choose to share an audience and brand-specific purchase events with a partner in Meta, without leaving the Hightouch interface.

Hightouch also supports connections with third-party data marketplaces for automated sharing, usage tracking, and billing.

Enhance audience reach for more CPM revenue

Increase ad sales revenue from every CPM-based campaign by boosting audience match rates with Match Booster. Increase audience reach across 30+ Match Booster supported media channels, driving higher revenue for every campaign.

On average, Match Booster can increase audience sizes by 35% by enhancing your first--party data with additional identifiers that help the ad platforms match and target more audience members.

How customers use Hightouch for Offsite Media Networks

Bol curates custom audiences for advertisers

Bol.com is the single largest e-commerce platform in Western Europe The company sells products from over 52,000 different sales partners to over 13 million active customers, and generated $178 million in advertising revenue in 2023.

Bol’s recipe for advertising sales success is customization. They work with their partners to define bespoke audiences for each campaign and then a performance manager uses Hightouch’s audience manager to build and activate those audiences.

Using Hightouch, Bol deploys custom audiences in minutes while searching across petabytes of first-party data. This resulted in significant performance improvements compared to their past DMP, including a 109% increase in total audience reach and a 33% increase in click-through rates for all brand advertisements.

Food delivery app monetizes purchase data through The Trade Desk

One of the world’s largest food delivery apps partners with Hightouch and The Trade Desk to run self-service offsite media on top of their rich historical purchase data.

By pushing custom audiences and merchant-specific conversion signals to the advertiser’s own Trade Desk seat, the advertisers can launch, optimize, and measure campaigns without relying on a large internal team or agency to execute.

This self-service approach has increased launch times, reduced operational costs, and offers their advertising clients unparalleled transparency and control.

Get started

Hightouch for Offsite Media is available for all Hightouch customers. With our composable pricing, you can pay for the tools you need to get started and bring in new capabilities as your offering evolves and scales.

Not a customer yet? Reach out to our solutions team for a personalized demo and see how Hightouch can help your team curate, activate, and monetize custom offsite audiences in minutes.