Bringing Commerce Media Into the Neighborhood

How Fluent and Bilt are connecting relevant brand offers with everyday shopping

Fluent is partnering with Bilt to bring our commerce media platform into everyday neighborhood shopping. Together, we’re connecting Fluent’s advertiser relationships and performance marketing expertise with Bilt’s technology and neighborhood network.

At Fluent, we help brands reach consumers at relevant touchpoints and help our partners generate revenue from those interactions. Our work with Bilt extends that focus into physical retail, with the goal of making in-store offers useful for shoppers and measurable for advertisers. For participating businesses, it creates an opportunity to earn additional revenue from the customer relationships they already have.

Start with the neighborhood

Where someone lives, works or stays influences the businesses they visit. A retailer might serve residents from the building next door, people working nearby and visitors staying at a local hotel. Bilt’s Neighborhood OS is designed to help businesses connect with those communities, recognize customers and build loyalty.

That context matters for commerce media. An offer has to make sense for the person seeing it and for the business presenting it. The same offer can feel useful in one setting and out of place in another. Timing, relevance and the surrounding experience all affect whether a customer has a reason to engage.

For us, the opportunity is to make relevant offers part of the relationship between a business and its customers. A useful offer adds value to a visit while opening an additional source of revenue for the business.

Connect advertiser demand with neighborhood commerce

We bring our commerce media platform, advertiser relationships and experience in performance marketing to the partnership. Bilt brings its neighborhood network and technology connecting commerce, customer recognition and loyalty.

Together, we’re fusing those capabilities through relevant offers integrated into Bilt’s platform in mutually agreed placements. The aim is to make it easier for participating businesses to benefit from advertiser demand and for brands to reach customers in the context of everyday shopping.

For a business, that means earning additional revenue from an interaction it already has with a customer. For an advertiser, it means reaching someone at a relevant opportunity and understanding the action an offer drives. The customer should receive something useful in return for their attention. Those benefits need to reinforce each other for the experience to work.

Make the experience useful and measurable

Consider a shopper who has just completed an in-store purchase. A relevant brand offer gives that person something useful to explore after their visit. If they choose to engage, the retailer could benefit from additional media revenue, while the advertiser could measure the response to its offer.

That is one example of the experience we’re working toward. The details matter: which offers fit the business, where they appear and how customers choose to engage. A retailer should have a say in the experience it presents. Customers should be able to understand the offer and decide whether it is useful to them.

Our performance marketing background shapes how we think about measurement. An offer appearing on a screen, a customer engaging with it and an eventual conversion tell us different things. Looking at those steps separately gives a clearer picture of what happened and what value was created. It also helps distinguish interest in an offer from an outcome an advertiser is trying to achieve.

For businesses and brands, that creates a basis for learning which experiences are worth continuing and which need to change. The goal is to connect a useful customer experience with results that the participating businesses can understand.

A broader role for neighborhood commerce

Bilt’s Neighborhood OS connects the communities where people spend time with the businesses around them, helping those businesses reach customers and build loyalty. Commerce media adds another way for participating businesses to benefit from those relationships.

Fluent’s partnership with Bilt is an opportunity to connect advertiser demand with more of the places people shop. It brings our experience in customer acquisition and monetization into a neighborhood setting, where a relevant offer can add value to an existing customer interaction.

We want brands to find customers who have a reason to engage and businesses to earn more from the relationships they already have. Making those interactions useful for shoppers is central to that goal. That’s what we’re working toward with Bilt.

Learn how Fluent’s commerce media platform can connect your brand or business with everyday shopping. Reach out to our team.