Retail media could gain as Gen Alpha targeting curbs make child-level attribution harder
For a gaming or toy brand, for instance, communication aimed at children may revolve around fun, identity and participation, while advertising aimed at parents could focus on safety, learning, value and appropriateness.
Retail media could gain as Gen Alpha targeting curbs make child-level attribution harder
Restrictions on behavioural tracking and targeted advertising of children could push more Gen Alpha advertising dollars towards retail and commerce media, as brands look for ways to measure sales without following individual young consumers across the digital advertising funnel.
Rajiv Dingra, Founder and CEO of ReBid, believes retail media could become particularly important because while advertisers may lose visibility into a child’s journey from ad exposure to purchase, they can still measure whether advertising ultimately influences household-level buying.
“Retail media becomes particularly interesting because brands may be unable to track the child’s advertising journey, but they can still measure whether exposure in a market or context eventually changes household-level purchases”.
The shift is part of a wider reset in how brands could spend money to reach Gen Alpha. Dingra estimates that 35–50% of Gen Alpha media currently heavily dependent on behavioural or audience-level targeting could be reallocated over the next few years.
“That does not mean 35–50% of total spending disappears. It moves into channels where relevance can be established without identifying or profiling the child,” he said.
Within this reallocated pool, Dingra expects around 10–15% to move towards retail and commerce media. Contextual media could take 30–35%, creators and communities 25–30%, while another 20–25% could shift towards parent-targeted advertising.
The implication for retail media goes beyond simply gaining another pool of advertising money. It could also play a bigger role in solving one of the most difficult problems created by tighter restrictions around advertising to minors: attribution.
From tracking the child to measuring the household
Digital advertising has historically allowed marketers to connect individual-level signals across different stages of the funnel, from what a consumer watches or clicks to whether that person subsequently makes a purchase.
That model becomes considerably harder when the consumer being advertised to is a child.
“The advertising industry has spent the last decade becoming addicted to user-level attribution. If you cannot identify, retarget and follow an individual from impression to purchase, the familiar performance dashboard starts becoming much less useful,” Dingra said.
Instead of asking whether a particular child saw an advertisement and later converted, marketers may increasingly have to assess whether advertising produced an incremental impact across a household, market or broader audience.
“The industry therefore needs to move from asking ‘Which child saw this ad and subsequently converted?’ to ‘Did exposing this audience, household or market to advertising create incremental business?’” Dingra said.
That could increase the importance of retailer sell-through data alongside incrementality testing, geo experiments, brand lift studies, contextual cohorts, clean-room measurement and marketing mix modelling.
For categories such as toys, gaming, snacks and beverages, fashion, beauty and children’s entertainment, the shift is particularly significant because the child is often the source of demand while the parent ultimately controls the purchase.