Retail media has been on a meteoric rise in recent years, enabling retailers to move into the advertising business.

By tapping into retailers’ first-party data, brands are able to target customers across websites, apps and off-site channels. In the UK, retail media spend is forecast to top £7bn this year, with Amazon alone accounting for £6bn, according to the IAB.

Now, as businesses catch on to the significant opportunity set out by retailers, non-retail companies are developing their own media networks to capture a share of growing ad budgets.

Enter commerce media networks (CMNs). Extending beyond retail, CMNs span industries from financial services to healthcare and travel. McKinsey projects that by 2027, the US commerce media market will reach more than $100bn (£73.85bn).

A subset of this trend is travel media networks, offering brands new ways to engage consumers at multiple points in the travel journey – from inspiration to booking and beyond.

Companies such as Expedia, Uber, Trainline and Tripadvisor are particularly well placed, holding vast amounts of first-party data through loyalty schemes and regular log-ins that reveal who their customers are and what they want.

What does this look like in practice?

Expedia has sold advertising on its platforms for more than two decades. However, the launch of Expedia Group Media Network last year marked a broader ambition to help both travel and non-endemic brands – those advertising outside their usual category – reach consumers across the entire journey, not just at the booking stage.

“We have 20-plus years’ of traveller insights, both intent and purchase data,” explains Expedia Group’s senior vice-president of media solutions Rob Torres. “Anywhere a traveller is in the journey, anywhere a brand wants to reach them, we should be able to find them.”

Where advertisers once could only access services like sponsored listings on a website, travel companies are now offering full advertising services, from creative production to measurement, building out separate advertising businesses to capitalise on this opportunity.

To put the potential into perspective, Expedia Group Media Solutions generated $639m (£471m) in revenue for 2024, a year-on-year rise of 32%. Meanwhile, Uber Advertising has surpassed $1.5bn (£1.1bn) in annual revenue run rate in Q1 of this year, growth of over 60% year-on-year.

Our ads business is a bit like a startup in a much bigger company.

Sam Eads, Trainline

Expedia’s partnership with VisitBritain is one example. A three-part short-form video series featuring comedians Lara Ricote and Stevie Martin promoted Britain as a tourism destination, the aim being to drive both awareness and bookings.

The campaign ran for almost two months, supported by a media plan spanning Expedia’s owned inventory (display and native ads) and external media (Amazon Prime and cinema). The creative targeted travellers in the US, France, Germany and Australia, directing traffic to a dedicated hub. The campaign resulted in more than 293 million impressions, 1 million clicks and 534,000 page views for VisitBritain.

It’s a similar story for Trainline. At the end of last year, the company formally launched its ads business, giving brands access to its first-party data for the first time to enable contextual targeting. To build out this offer, it recruited a new team and partnered with technology providers like PubMatic and Scope3

“Our ads business is a bit like a startup in a much bigger company,” explains head of UK ad sales and account management, Sam Eads.

The company, which has 27 million monthly active users globally (18 million in the UK), had previously run an open marketplace for advertising. Under new leadership appointed in November, the focus has shifted to curating partnerships and placements that “enhance” the customer journey.

“It was a no-brainer,” says Eads. “For 25 years, it [Trainline] has sat on this enormous amount of customer data. This is the same opportunity we’ve seen in retail media, with brands like Tesco and Sainsbury’s capitalising on their audiences.”

Eads argues spend is shifting “away from the more traditional spray-and-pray approach” to targeted campaigns. Non-endemic brands, in particular, are using Trainline to reach consumers in the moment. For example, on a hot day, a passenger travelling to Bournemouth might be served a discounted product offer for a retail product they can use on the train.

“There is significant interest starting to come through from some of these verticals that, traditionally, a marketer wouldn’t have come straight to Trainline for,” he says.

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Uber entered commerce media in 2022, appointing Paul Wright to lead its UK ads business before expanding across Europe. The operation now has three teams: one focused on restaurant partners such as KFC, another on FMCG clients including Waitrose and a third on non-endemic advertisers such as L’Oréal.

While not a pure travel business, Uber’s “journey ads” tap into intent data. Ads are served in-app based on a passenger’s destination and profile.

“We’re very precise,” says Wright. “If someone’s going to an airport, we know the terminal and sometimes even their flight.”

One example is an airport-bound rider receiving an ad for a L’Oréal fragrance, with a coupon redeemable in-store.

“It’s a powerful way of moving from a digital world into a physical world,” he adds. “We’re capturing the intent of that consumer in the moment. If they’re going to a train station, or equally, if they’re going out to some friends for dinner. There are all those different cultural moments people enjoy with Uber rides.”

Partnerships, creative services, measurement

Despite media networks having a rich source of data to target consumers, there are additional ways they can work with advertisers.

Expedia, for instance, has expanded partnerships with platforms such as Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu and Pinterest, allowing advertisers to reach travellers beyond its sites. The differentiator, Torres says, is Expedia’s ability to overlay its first-party data on those channels, enabling more precise targeting and retargeting than brands could achieve directly.

“Could brands buy directly from those platforms? Possibly,” says Torres. “But they wouldn’t get the benefit of our data layered on top. We can actually pump in our first-party data along with other first-party data and do a better job of targeting or retargeting that customer. You wouldn’t get that if you bought that directly.”

Meanwhile, travel media networks allow for multi-brand partnerships, a service Tripadvisor is aiming to build out. Before Covid, Tripadvisor’s advertisers were mostly travel brands, but it has since pivoted to work more closely with non-endemic categories, including Mars Petcare.

“Whenever we launch a media partnership, we look at how multiple brands can work together without competing, so each benefits,” says Justin Reid, senior media director for international markets.

Tripadvisor’s advertising arm is called Global Partnerships Solution to reflect this approach.

“The global part of it means we can look anywhere in the world. That’s the beauty of a travel platform, you can look anywhere in the world and bring partners together,” he adds.

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Meanwhile, many travel networks have expanded their creative services, offering in-house production to support brand campaigns. These teams work directly with brands to help creatively bring to life different campaigns.

“We have a creative services group in-house that helps think about some interesting solutions to those problems,” explains Torres.

Trainline has also seen “significant appetite” for creative support.

“From a marketing perspective, there is still a barrier whereby budgets are tight on creative and in order to test a new partner, you have to offer the ability to help with that creative,” says Eads.

Measurement is the other key demand. Advertisers want clear evidence of return on ad spend and networks are investing heavily to provide it.

Expedia is investing in measurement capabilities, aiming for a system that tracks performance both on and off-site. Current development includes integrating lift studies, multi-touch attribution and audience lookalikes, with clean room technology seen as a future enabler for privacy-safe data sharing with partners, according to Torres.

If you have the data, you’re going to be one of the winners in this, but you’re absolutely going to be held accountable for the measurement piece.

Rob Torres, Expedia

“The tough part is, we have a very good sense of what [consumers] are doing if they’re on our sites. We can follow them around and then, if they have touched other sites,  we can follow them and get a sense of where they’ve gone,” Torres says.

“But we don’t necessarily know if they converted elsewhere, unless somebody shares that back to us. That’s what we’re trying to solve for now.”

Eads believes measurement is a “fast evolving” area and a key need is to ensure networks aren’t “marking their own homework”.

“One of the questions that I would typically ask agencies when we go in, and particularly where we’re very swiftly developing our offering, is what do they want to see?” he adds.

Uber, meanwhile, has invested in attention metrics. Wright claims the average time users spend looking at Uber ads is 6.6 times higher than on online video, social in-feed or mobile display, second only to YouTube pre-roll.

“We know with that if you’ve got high attention, you get high recall and high brand consideration,” he says.

The future? According to Torres, more accurate measurement and a consolidation of media networks are on the horizon.

“If you have the data, you’re going to be one of the winners in this, but you’re absolutely going to be held accountable for the measurement piece,” he says.

This is the first piece in a two-part series exploring the rise of commerce media networks.