‘Data is what we do’: Why Mastercard entered the commerce media race

For a few years, it seemed like every company that could create a retail media network would—so much so that retail media outgrew its original moniker and instead became known as commerce media.

Why not try to get a bigger piece of the pie when, per WPP’s 2025 forecast, commerce media could account for nearly a fifth of total ad revenue by 2030?

Last October, Mastercard officially debuted its own offering, Mastercard Commerce Media, joining the ranks of the financial institutions jockeying for some of those ad dollars.

To hear it from Nili Klenoff, executive vice president of Commerce Media at Mastercard, doing so wasn’t simply a matter of getting skin in the game. Instead, the push into commerce media marked an evolution of the company’s existing personalized card-linked offers business.

“We took a look at our solution and said, ‘This is really fit for purpose for this moment,’” Klenoff told us at CES. “It’s now about taking that and evolving that into a broader value proposition, supporting more kinds of content—not just incentives and discounts, but also digital ads—and then having the ability to flex between an ad to build awareness or a well-timed incentive at the right moment to actually drive the conversion.”

Swing and a… pitch: Mastercard’s pitch to marketers hinges on the breadth of its data, which amounts to “roughly 160 billion transactions” annually, per Klenoff, along with its scale, and the company’s “proprietary technology” in the form of its card-linking, which means that incentives are linked to a customer’s card.

“The card-linking piece actually really allows us to link the incentive the consumer takes an action in the experience of the publisher, and then by taking that action, they’re actually–our system is linking the incentive to the card, but it’s also allowing us to do the attribution and the incrementality on the back end,” Klenoff said.

In action, that could look like a consumer looking to dine out and being influenced on where to go after seeing a personalized offer from a restaurant brand, Klenoff offered as an example. “That’s truly the incrementality,” Klenoff said of the hypothetical use case. “And so that card-linking piece, again, was a clear differentiator. And then the hyper-personalization we’ve been investing in algorithms for years based on the insights from the data.”

Benefit in waiting: The continued growth of commerce media hasn’t been without growing pains. The volume of ad networks today coupled with budget concerns and frustrations about the lack of standardization when it comes to measurement and attribution are just a few of the issues giving some marketers headaches.

Understanding some of those issues ahead of creating Mastercard’s Commerce Media offering “reinforced” how the company thought about its assets and the value of entering the space now, Klenoff said.

“A lot of the retail media networks, they’re retailers, right? They have a lot of data. But they weren’t necessarily packaging up that data, exporting that to provide a service to customers,” Klenoff said. “Data is what we do at MasterCard. It’s in our DNA.”