Faire throws its hat into the retail media ring with first ‘Promoted’ ads

Faire is stepping into the holy grail of digital advertising—retail media—with the launch of its first advertising tool, Promoted Listings.

Faire’s Chief Product Officer Ami Vora told Retail Brew that promoted listings is focused on “driving real growth” for smaller brands like Cheese Brothers, Lark Fine Foods, and Honey House Naturals that sell in bulk on its site.

The ad shows up like a product tile on Faire, an online wholesale marketplace that stocks 100,000 brands on its platform, with a promoted tag. Vora said users will most commonly find these ads on the search page, and Faire will feed them the promoted ads that might match what they’re searching for.

“The reason we’re going this path into advertising is to help our brands grow,” Vora said. “We know that’s hard when you’re a small business.”

Typically, small brands just “don’t have a lot of tools to grow,” Vora pointed out. They either have to resort to spending money on a trade show to get eyes on their products, or they end up taking a break from their production line, she explained. Faire’s plan with promoted listings is to reach retailers who want to build wholesale relationships, which are high volume, and enable reorders, Vora added.

“We’ve seen brands use this product to find customers they normally wouldn’t,” Vora said.

Faire’s first foray into retail media is hardly surprising. Retail media has become a hot topic among retailers because it’s more profitable to sell ads online than selling physical goods—the margins are higher. Amazon made ~$12.8 billion just by selling ads in the last quarter, while Walmart’s ad business grew at a faster clip (26%) than Amazon (20%), per eMarketer.

Retail media was one of the fastest growing US advertising channels in 2022 and jumped more than 22% to reach $38 billion, according to a report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. This is expected to more than double over the next five years to $107 billion, according to the IAB report.

Andrew Lipsman, independent analyst at Media, Ads + Commerce, said in an email that “it makes perfect sense” for Faire to build a retail media network. However, as a wholesale site for local retailers, “the [retail media network] dynamics for Faire will be somewhat different, since it will generate less traffic than a B2C marketplace, but each converted sales is much more valuable,” he said.