Commerce media has outgrown retail. While supermarkets and ecommerce giants helped define the category, a new wave of businesses is proving the model can work just as effectively for advertisers focused on leads, bookings and services rather than products.
Drawing on a recent conversation with Checkatrade’s Ayrat Maksyutov at Retail Media X, Paul Dahill, Managing Director EMEA Sales at Koddi, explores five lessons for building commerce media businesses beyond traditional retail…
Commerce media is no longer just a retail story. When most people think about the category, they picture the usual suspects: grocery giants, big-box retailers, ecommerce platforms sitting on mountains of purchase data and brand budgets.
Yet increasingly our conversations are with businesses that don’t sell Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) or don’t have a merchandising team, and whose advertisers think in bookings and leads, rather than units and baskets.Â
In a recent discussion at Retail Media X with Ayrat Maksyutov from Checkatrade, the platform of trusted tradespeople, we explored what it takes to build and scale a commerce media business. Advertiser challenges differ by business, but the discipline required to do it well are much the same.
Here’s what I took away from our conversation and what I think it means for anyone building or investing in commerce media right now.
1: Speak the language of your advertiser, not the industry
Checkatrade deliberately stripped return on investment (ROI) and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) out of the conversation with their tradesperson advertisers.
Not because those metrics don’t matter, but because plumbers, roofers and electricians who start work at seven in the morning and are trying to fill their calendar for the week, prioritise simplicity.
So, instead, Checkatrade talks in terms of jobs and leads. It’s the same value, expressed in a completely different language, one that the advertiser (tradespeople in this instance) actually speak.
This sounds simple, but it’s genuinely hard to execute, and most platforms don’t do it. They default to the industry’s vocabulary and expect advertisers to meet them there.
The lesson for a business looking to build a commerce media network is that your onboarding, reporting, and product user interface should all be designed around how your advertisers think about their business, not how your commerce platform thinks about inventory.
2: The long tail demands simplicity at every layer
Checkatrade’s advertiser base is overwhelmingly small media enterprises (SMEs). We’re talking one-to-ten person operations, where the plasterer doing a job at midday is the person setting the ad budget in the evening.
That reality shaped every product decision Checkatrade made around its commerce media offering. Their sponsored listings were built as a self-serve experience with a target of thirty seconds from sign-up to live, automated bidding, minimal configuration and absolutely no fluff.
We agreed that the moment a workaround requires manual intervention, it cannot scale. If you’re building for the long tail and any part of your process needs a human to touch it at volume, you don’t have a product, you have a pilot.
That instinct, to hold the line on scalability even when manual shortcuts feel faster, is one of the discipline gaps we see most often in early-stage commerce media programmes.
3: Free credits aren’t a gimmick; they’re a trust mechanism
Launching a sponsored product to tradespeople who’ve never thought about advertising ROI required a different kind of proof. Checkatrade solved it by offering free credits at launch.
Not discounts. Not trials buried in a contract. Just: here’s value, use it, see what happens and make your own decision.
The outcome was that tradespeople could observe the product working in their own context, in their own language, before committing a penny.
For a category where word of mouth between tradespeople is the most powerful distribution channel available, getting those first happy customers to become advocates was incredibly important.Â
4: Targeting isn’t just a brand tool, it’s a pipeline tool
Here’s one that genuinely reframes targeting in non-retail environments. Ayrat described a plumber who came to them frustrated about London traffic, spending his days stuck between jobs on opposite sides of the city.
Sponsored listings gave that plumber the ability to prioritise leads from specific postcodes and to bid more aggressively in the areas that worked for his schedule. The value wasn’t more leads. It was better leads, in the right location and at the right time.Â
Commerce media’s targeting proposition is often sold on scale and precision for brand advertisers. But for SME advertisers, the conversation is simpler and arguably more compelling: control over your own pipeline.
5: Don’t let the next shiny thing derail the fundamentals
The advice to anyone launching a commerce media programme was blunt: pick the thing that matters most and protect it. Near-endemic display and AI search integrations are being explored, but none of them are the top priority, offsite ads are their focus at the moment.
The discipline isn’t in knowing what to build, it’s in knowing what not to build yet.
Commerce media’s next chapter won’t be written by retailers alone. It will be written by platforms that understand their advertisers deeply enough to meet them where they are, in their language and on their terms.
Remembering that the fundamentals don’t change across verticals, the context does. There are many more industries still to figure this out.
Every vertical with captive audiences, intent signals and underserved advertisers is a commerce media network waiting to happen. There are more of them than most people realise, retail and tradespeople are just the beginning.
Every vertical is at a different stage of the journey, but none of them are starting from zero, the expertise is already available. With the right foundations in technology and people, many verticals new to commerce media can scale and thrive.
Paul Dahill is Managing Director EMEA Sales at Koddi. For more information visit: koddi.com