The Track Me Fast team members have attended this year’s OMR Festival in Hamburg, Germany and are happy to share their takeaways for e-commerce companies from it.
The annual OMR Festival is, undoubtedly, a massive event, and this year it was more huge than ever! Over the two days of the expo & conference 70 thousand of the festival attendees exchanged their opinions on the hottest digital tech trends, along with their forecasts on what the future holds for the global technology ecosystem.
In the e-commerce angle, in particular, many industry leaders have taken the stage to share their vision of what the world’s e-retail industry is living and breathing today, and how it’s likely to evolve in the months to come.
Non-surprisingly, the Track Me Fast has visited OMR 2023, too, and now that the event is over, we’re delighted to share our takeaways from it.
Retail Media Advertising Undergoes Galloping Growth
While last year, when the entire e-commerce industry was buzzing about retail media advertising, the niche was somehow still in its infancy, at least in the tech aspect, in 2023 this sector is really undergoing galloping growth.
With Walmart ad revenue soaring up to 2,700,000,000 USD in 2022, the entire retail media market value is likely to reach the impressive 150,000,000,000 by 2023, according to some experts.
In this respect, one of the keys to such an astounding growth trend lies in retailers’ exclusive access to premium, personalized, consented customer data, in addition to a wide variety of available advertising formats they can offer to brands. These, in particular, include both the onsite options (e.g. sponsored ads, branded content placements), in-store ad placements (including those on digital screens), mixed with customer loyalty programs and co-productions.
Nonetheless, the retail media advertising market is yet to overcome its two biggest challenges, i.e. scale and cross-retailer outreach, even though things are looking up in this area, too.
AR in Online Shopping Tech is Gaining Traction
One of the currently popular use cases for AR technology, aside from the gaming segment, lies in online shopping, and Snap Inc. is, quite predictably, pioneering this niche on mobile.
According to the company’s official reports, 3 in 4 snapchatters admit that the app is a convenient way to shop with friends, when they’re not around, and the implemented AR filtering is fueling this trend to a significant extent.
Quite predictably, we forecast that the AR-assisted shopping vertical will continue expanding in the months to come, with more companies jumping in to fight for their market share.
Social Advertising Remains Hot (but this is nothing new)
Aside from Meta’s continuous failures in their online advertising practices, social advertising as a whole remains one of the hottest niches for e-commerce businesses.
In particular, TikTok is fighting hard to secure its spot as the top social ad channel for all age categories in the EMEA, with its updated data stating that over 60% of its users are over 25 years old.
The Track Me Fast team would like to thank OMR 2023 organizers and everyone we met in person during this year’s event. See you next year!