Consumer Brands, Retailers Are Driving Ad Growth: Uber’s Megan Ramm

Uber Technologies is working to expand its advertising business by touting its unique value proposition to brands. Its ride-sharing and food-delivery apps have geographical and order-history information that can help to determine consumer intentions. “We’re growing rapidly. Our formats are growing rapidly,” Megan Ramm, global director and head of consumer packaged goods partnerships at Uber Ads, said in this interview with Lisa Granatstein, editorial director of Beet.TV. “We have major acceleration with our performance products on the grocery and retail side,” Ramm said. We “continue to see a lot of interest from CPGs tapping into our search products, the baseline products with this net new, younger set.” Amid this growth outlook, there are challenges facing retailers that sell advertising. The category of retail media networks has become more crowded as a broader variety of companies offer ad space and the promise of harnessing consumer data for improved audience targeting. Key Challenges The challenges include “standard of measurement, features and formats, the list goes on,” Ramm said. “We’ve had a lot of efforts from the IAB, the MRC [Media Rating Council] people to standardize the way that we think about measurement.” Media attribution also is a key area of interest to ensure that the right channels get proper credit for driving a consumer interaction or sale. “Is this a sale that’s net new? Could I have gotten it in my brick and mortar? Did I get it? Did I truly get this incremental sale online on your channel versus another?” Ramm said. “Are you driving a different and differentiated audience versus what you would be driving in their brick and mortar? That’s where we’re going to start to see change in value.” You’re watching “Why Relevance Rules in Ecommerce,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Rokt. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. Commerce Media Marks Convergence of Digital and Retail: Criteo’s Brian Gleason & Uber’s Megan Ramm