Seamless Xtra’s Paula Hallentuch speaks with Maria Kristalinskaya, Head of Retail Media at Kleinanzeigen, Germany’s largest recommerce platform.
Maria is responsible for developing retail media working with sales, marketing and product teams. Before stepping into her role at Kleinanzeigen, Maria worked as Country Manager at idealo. She has also worked at BBDO Group with major e-commerce brands. She studied strategic marketing at Imperial College London.
Maria, the first question I’d like to ask is how do you define retail media?
My personal opinion is that retail media has existed for ages. If you look at Tesco or Lidl or any of the big supermarket chains you will see they have been doing brick and mortar retail media for decades. Even before we were born they would have been looking at how to promote one brand over another. When COVID started, online trade started to jump, Amazon ads exploded together with the Amazon e-commerce marketplace and I think this started to drive retail media as a solution and of course, it drove a desperate need for monetization.
Now, even small retailers are looking for opportunities such as how can they monetize their websites better and how they can get access for their users. So for me personally, retail media is a combination of different strategies and different channels that could be used online and offline to reach the end user. The beauty of retail media is that you are catching a user in the moment when they already want to purchase a product. When it comes to the online website, they are already into the consideration stage or into the purchase stage. They might not have decided what brand they would like or maybe there are some specifications of the product they are not sure about, but they want to purchase. This is the beauty of retail media and why it’s strongly about conversions and also brand recognition.
How does retail media differ from traditional advertising channels in e-commerce?
When I was working at Idealo, as in any other major digital company, the main channels of advetising were Facebook, Google and TikTok, which started to emerge at that time. You load your creatives, videos and pictures, you select the target audience you want to target, and your ads are launched. On Google, it’s a little bit different. You write your ads and select the keywords you want to be shown, and it’s launched. The beauty of retail media, however, is that your customer already knows what they want. And this is why retail media is much closer to the purchase. Retail media networks are also usually much more expensive than the likes of Google and Facebook because they have this absolutely different point of contact with the customers.
At Kleinanzeigen, we at are a traditional recommerce platform. We are a classified platform and we’ve never had this offline experience. But for us, we are aiming to be the first one because there are not so many recommerce platforms and classified platforms of the scale and size of Kleinanzeigen
If you think about Adevinta, we are attracting users globally who are more interested in recommerce than other forms of retail so this is slightly different. There is a big discussion in Germany’s IAB community (German Association for the Digital Economy) around who is a retailer and who can define retail media standards.Then if we speak about attribution window. For some, retail media attribution should be two days, for others 30 days, for others 15 days, and it’s really hard to agree. In the end we are trying to build new standards but it is challenging when everyone understands retail media completely differently.
Do you think new technologies like AI and smart analytics can enhance the success of retail media?
Yes, of course they will. But the big question is, when will we start using them on a bigger scale where they will really make a difference. Amazon is already doing retail media, and their technological solution is here. But our technological solutions are very different so most of the retail media players still have to figure out the basics. They need to think about how to create a good product that can drive good conversion rates and drive a good mix for users and customers.
So we use AI and machine learning for personalisation. We use it for relevancy. But I believe these are just tiny steps right now. AI will emerge further, the more brandsabsorb it, and perhaps in a few years, all the creatives will be done completely by algorithm and AI machines. Facebook is already really good in adjusting the size of creatives. That is just the first step wth new service providers appearing where you can generate images or algorithms. This is the future of advertising where you don’t need expensive photo shoots. You can generate a video AI, upload it on the platform, on retail media, how someone is using your product and how it works. This is the future and I’m really excited to be a part of this.
In general, how does Kleinanzeigen navigate the balance between user experience and advertising?
We’re a traditional classified platform so it’s not a secret that we have always shown a lot of ads and a lot of third party ads. Our goal right now is to switch to more healthy advertising where we can balance the user needs with the customer needs. We also want to find the customers, shops and brands who are relevant for our user offering and bring them to the platform. Then alongside C2C offers we plan to show B2C offers that are also relevant in terms of price, context and product qualities the users are looking for. So this is how we see retail media is enhancing the user experience. We also have to think how are we going to be different from all other players on the market. As a Recommerce platform, working with sustainable companies is our number one priority. We plan to maximize the sustainable inventory on our platform and continue to be this driver for sustainability that we are already.
What are the potential future developments we can expect to see in retail media within e-commerce?
Attribution, data and privacy concerns are all going to further define the industry of retail media in the upcoming years. Then of course it is going to be AI and machine learning that will further develop our industry. And of course, the question will continue to be how to find the balance between users and advertising. This is going to be a big question for all the players on retail media scene.
Thank you very much for your time, Maria and for sharing your insights. I’m looking forward to meeting you at Seamless Europe this year.
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Image: Maria Kristalinskaya, Head of Retail Media at Kleinanzeigen
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