Retail news that keeps industry professionals informed
Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights around marketing, DTC and e-commerce to keep executives and decision makers up to date.
It turns out that retail media doesn’t mean success for everyone.
Microsoft is reportedly shutting down its retail media platform, PromoteIQ, due to low margins. Digiday broke the news on October 7.
PromoteIQ’s former chief revenue officer Harsh Jiandani told Digiday that PromoteIQ was operating at “very low margins” and Microsoft wanted to focus more on profitability, adding that Microsoft realized “it was going to take a while” before it could make $1 billion on the company.
Microsoft declined to comment on the details of PromoteIQ. However, Lynne Kjolso, VP of global partnerships and retail media at Microsoft Advertising, told Retail Brew that Microsoft Advertising continues to provide clients with access to retail media inventory through “multiple avenues,” including its partnership with third-party ad technology platform Criteo.
“Criteo will allow our advertisers to extend their reach to customers at the bottom of the funnel … through a single point of entry through the Microsoft Advertising Platform,” Kjolso said in an email.
Andrew Lipsman, independent analyst at Media, Ads + Commerce, told Retail Brew via email that PromoteIQ had a “strong reputation” before the Microsoft acquisition. Promote IQ “was often selected by [retail media networks] because of a flexible architecture that allowed for greater customization,” he said.
However, Lipsman was quick to add that he doesn’t have “a strong feeling” about what happened after Microsoft’s acquisition, but alluded to things that could have gone wrong soon after. He said he had heard that PromoteIQ “lost some key executives and big customers” after Microsoft bought it.
Microsoft acquired PromoteIQ in 2019. At the time, Rik van der Kooi, corporate VP of Microsoft Advertising, wrote that PromoteIQ’s technology “strategically complements” Microsoft’s retail advertising offerings. The deal was intended to help Microsoft better compete with rivals such as Amazon, which have built significant advertising businesses on the strength of retail media.
“Together, we can enable retailers with a portfolio of technology solutions to modernize their e-commerce platforms and maximize their monetization opportunity,” van der Kooi wrote in a 2019 blog post.
On the ad buying side, Kjolso said that Microsoft’s technology stack, Curate, which is open to third parties, will “grow the inventory of curated deals offered to advertisers to reach shoppers that they can buy through their [demand side platform] choice.”