Meta Enters Retail Media With New Ad Offerings — Retail Bum

Meta is looking to reboot its advertising business after Apple’s rollout of iOS 14 with two new advertising tools for retailers and eCommerce advertisers that promise to deliver enhanced performance.

The social media giant’s Managed Partner Ads Lite (MPA) is one of the advertising tools the company is testing with partners such as Walgreens and Dollar General, enabling them to leverage retail media networks to create more personalized advertisements.

With MPA, retailers can expand their media networks and generate ads on Meta’s platforms, increasing sales for specific brand partners or product SKUs.

In addition, Meta has introduced local inventory ads to enhance its ad products with omnichannel capabilities, which drive online purchases and promote in-store sales and local inventory movement. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of local inventory ads should take into account users’ sensitivity to location data sharing. Therefore, compared to search engines like Google or Bing, social networking sites like Meta may not be as appropriate for local inventory ads.

The effectiveness of the MPA feature relies on the availability of first-party data, and it could hold considerable importance for more extensive retail media networks. Meanwhile, the recently introduced local…