The world of e-commerce has suffered a whiplash of sorts since the pandemic started more than two years ago.
With consumers stuck at home, the segment went into overdrive growth — then hit the brakes hard the next year once people felt safe shopping in stores again. Now as the holding company players put on their neck braces and get back to business, a few independents are seizing the moment to beef up their own offerings in the broader commerce media space.
Court Avenue, which has its hands in agency media and creative, social, consulting and digital development, quietly got an e-commerce unit up and running behind the scenes since its founding in early 2020. Meanwhile, the newly rebranded Cincinnati-based Icon Commerce (formerly Icon Marketing & Communications) is working with three locally-based startup companies to help them grow their e-commerce and retail media businesses by tapping them into relationships it has with both Amazon and Shopify — Digiday has learned — access they wouldn’t have on their own.
(In a small-world coincidence, Michael Stich, general partner and CEO of services at Court Avenue, and Shawn Murdock, CEO and founder of Icon Commerce, know each other well from time spent at Rockfish, a digital agency that was sold back in 2011 to WPP.)
For Court Avenue, the secret to success in commerce media is based on a combination of beefing up content while also ramping up consumer research. Working with clients including Elanco (a pet pharmaceutical firm backed by Eli Lilly, Bayer and Pfizer) and Epson, Stich and head of commerce strategy Bourke Kelley, agreed technological advances have helped enable some of what the agency is doing for clients, particularly in business-to-business (B2B) marketing.
“We’re betting on some of this future stuff and finding cost effective and automatable ways to do things that have historically been expensive,” said Stich. “What is inexorable, I would argue, is our ability to see…
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