The Surprising Power of the Digital Endcap

Is This Retail Media’s Most Powerful Format—Both Online and In-Store?

Around late 2011, display ads for Kraft and P&G brands started appearing on the Amazon.com and Walmart.com homepages. My boss, who had a deep background in CPG marketing, remarked at the time: “That’s really interesting—it’s almost like a digital endcap,” noting the parallel between these online branding opportunities and CPG brands’ long tradition of shopper marketing in-store displays.

Further investigation found that the average CPM for these “digital endcaps” were surprisingly low—in fact, at $2.74 slightly below the average online display CPM of $2.91.

But our intuition told us these display ads were the most valuable on the internet because they reached shoppers near the bottom of the funnel. That they would be “cheap” by display ad standards defied logic. More likely, retailers couldn’t command higher CPMs because ad selling wasn’t their forte.

If ROAS were as standardized back then as it is today, no doubt these campaigns would be near the top of the performance heap. What a fantastic advertising arbitrage for Kraft, P&G and other marketers smart enough to jump on these ad units in the early days.