The Track Me Fast team members have been to DMEXCO 2024 and are delighted to share major takeaways for the e-commerce industry from it.
DMEXCO 2024 has been a massive success, bringing together over 800 top-rated speakers on the multiple conference stages, as well as thousands of digital companies across the huge expo space of Koelnmesse in Cologne, Germany, – all to exchange their vision of the future of online media, advertising and, certainly, digital commerce, and establish new partnerships in various market niches.
From the latter angle, in particular, e-commerce has become a focal point of discussions within this year’s special DMEXCO Retail Media Summit, during which some of the global industry leaders, like Google, Criteo, Amazon and others, have shared their outlook of the current state of the retail media ecosystem, key challenges it’s still facing and ways to overcome those in the most efficient way possible.
Certainly, the Track Me Fast team members have attended DMEXCO 2024 as well, and now that the event is over, are excited to share their insights from it.
Retail Media Dominance is Here to Stay
From what’s been clear from the experts’ panel discussions, retail media is still keeping its dominant positions on the global market, while also undergoing sharp further growth in the EMEA. In fact, according to IAB Europe, this industry sector is apparently repeating the sharp ascend trend, tracked in the linear TV niche in the 1980s and 1990s.
What this means is that the retail media market will continue booming in the short-term perspective (currently growing 4x faster than the overall advertising market) and reach 31,000,000,000 EUR in value in Europe by 2028 (per IAB Europe), possibly to be followed by a gradual slow-down later on.
In this respect, while Amazon’s domination in the EU is still undisputed, given its current ~25-30% market share, the diversification is coming, and sooner than it was expected before.
As for the key industry challenges, the overall fragmentation, as well as the absence of the common standards in the incrementality sales measurement are still notable, making these some of the key growth areas for 2025 and beyond.
AI in Retail Media: Automation, Personalization & Measurement
Quite predictably, AI-based technologies have had a massive impact on the evolution of the global retail media landscape over the past several years, and this trend isn’t going away anytime soon.
Namely, some of the major use cases of next-gen AI-focused solutions in e-commerce include:
- extended content personalization capabilities, particularly when it comes to product recommendations;
- automated, hence streamlined A/B testing options;
- enhanced sales incrementality measurement using the complex ML algorithms
- monitoring and analysis of infrastructure, e.g. using website monitoring tools, and many more.
At the same time, most digital retailers agree that the adoption of precise ethical and content guidelines, regarding the use of AI, are vital for maintaining customers’ trust and loyalty both in the short- and long-term perspective.
The Track Me Fast team would like to thank DMEXCO organizers and everyone we’ve had a chance to connect with at the event! See you at DMEXCO 2025!