Welcome again to AdExchanger’s Commerce Media E-newsletter.
Some unhappy information to begin. Pour one out for the ecommerce model founders who’ve been placing their advertising budgets on a company (or perhaps a private) bank card. Meta has confirmed rumors that subsequent month it can start requiring advertisers to pay by bill, no extra bank cards.
The key cashback and rewards loophole, whereby founder-marketer sorts earned bank card factors on their advertising spend, is collateral injury in Meta’s a lot bigger struggle towards fraud and misuse of its advert platform. Unhealthy actors desire the benefit and secrecy of a bank card – even typically utilizing stolen bank cards for advert platform buys – to being pressured right into a banking connection.
However again to some happier information. Which is happier information solely in essentially the most 2026 sense of the phrase – as in, the information itself verges on dystopian.
And that’s as a result of Sallie, previously Sallie Mae and the main issuer of US schooling loans, is moving into the retail media community enterprise.
Backpack Media, as its new advert enterprise is known as, brings a “distinctive mixture of schooling and monetary indicators that enables us to venture [students’] future trajectories,” Marco Steinsieck, Sallie’s managing VP and head of promoting, advised AdExchanger.
Sallie is, if something, late to the sport right here. With Backpack Media, the corporate will start serving adverts on its websites and properties, together with sponsorship pages, “thanks” pages, the homepage and different owned places. Steinsieck additionally mentioned Sallie is working with DSP and SSP companions who can deliver the omnichannel gamut: audio, CTV, on-line video, digital out-of-home, and many others.
Nonetheless, the campaigns can be managed service. An advertiser can’t simply take a Sallie viewers section and use it to focus on on The Commerce Desk, for example. “The viewers stays inside our closed ecosystem,” he mentioned.
Now can also be a compelling time for Sallie to enter the RMN market, in accordance with Steinsieck, who beforehand was head of the Sephora Media Community and was GM of the Staples Media Community earlier than that. So he’s conversant in the marketplace for large-but-mid-level RMNs.
For one factor, he mentioned, the retail media market has centered totally on the previous. What was lately bought? And what knowledge might be tied to a buyer who made the transaction?
“The closed loop goes to be develop into the lazy loop” in retail media, he mentioned.
Sallie doesn’t do closed-loop transaction attribution, he mentioned, however the concept is to create audiences with insights about future purchases.
Who’s about to graduate, and what did they research? The place did they go to highschool? Who’s probably shifting into their first solo condominium within the subsequent 12 months?
These are segmentable audiences based mostly on Sallie’s knowledge set, in accordance with Steinsieck.
Though, not all advertisers can be sanctioned. He mentioned the corporate has a suppression record for manufacturers within the alcohol class or sports activities playing apps, say, which could want to goal 20-something-year-old males.
Nonetheless, that leaves loads of monetary providers, insurance coverage, retail and CPG companies which may discover helpful focusing on segments inside Sallie’s graph of present and former college students who’ve taken out schooling loans.
“It’s in all probability smart for me to not get too deep into our particular viewers knowledge at this second,” Steinsieck mentioned, when prompted for extra element on how an advertiser would possibly analyze or bundle audiences inside Backpack Media. “However you’ll be able to think about the kind of knowledge that we’ve, proper?”
