Nearly a year after rebranding Asda Media Partnerships to LS Eleven, Asda has introduced Asda Access. Access uses Asda’s 7 million+ first-party customers and enhances audience targeting with second-party partnerships and third-party demographic and banking data.
Asda Access enables brands to plan, activate and measure omnichannel campaigns with both managed and self-serve options. Advertisers can leverage purchase behaviour, demographics, lookalike modelling, and propensity scoring to engage shoppers across The Trade Desk for programmatic, Meta, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube and Connected TV.
Brands can choose between fully managed services or self-serve access to over 3,000 audience segments. Additionally, Access is offering creative capabilities from Asda’s creative experts to develop engaging content to use
The self-serve model
Retail media networks have traditionally followed a managed service model, where retailers controlled all aspects of advertising campaigns. While this provided advertisers with a hands-off approach and gave retailers greater control, it also came with limitations in terms of scalability.
Self-service capabilities were key to Google’s and Meta’s advertising platforms. Amazon Advertising pioneered the self-serve approach in retail media, offering a comprehensive suite of self-service tools.
Self-service offers lots of benefits:
- Scalability & Revenue Potential – Self-service automates campaign management, reducing operational costs and the need for large account teams.
- Agency-Friendly Management – Self-service works for media buying agencies, as it supports multi-account access, flexible budgets, and standardised reporting, making it easier for agencies to manage multiple clients.
- Access for the long tail of small and medium advertisers: Lower spend requirements and user-friendly tools attract mid to long-tail advertisers and third-party sellers, increasing ad participation and sales.
Self-service is not without its challenges. The main issues are staff. Are advertiser’s set-up to manage self-service? Will they have the skills to manage multiple self-service? Finally, do they have to capabilities to ‘dig into the data’ that the likes of Asda Access offer?
The reality is that managed service may be what is needed for everyone but the most sophisticated advertisers – and that’s ok. We are still relatively early in retail media adoption and development, so self-serve can only help – even if the initial uptake is not there.
