How a Retail Media Network keeps control of its advertising
Learn where a retailer's control lives in your Business Account: its inventory, its shoppers' data, the advertisers it admits, the creative it runs, and the numbers it reports.
A retail media network sells advertising on the retailer's own store, app, and emails to the brands it stocks, and increasingly to brands it doesn't. The risk is that the selling happens somewhere else. Inventory shrinks to the banner slots an ad platform recognises. Shopper data is copied into that platform to make targeting work. Results are reported by the same platform that sold the media. Genuin's model keeps the network on the retailer's property. Product pages, app feeds, and a hosted social experience on your own domain become video inventory. Sellers, creators, and shoppers supply the content. You set the terms for every advertiser, and the reporting is yours. This page maps that to the product, control by control. For the commerce-media view of the same account, see How a Commerce Media Network keeps control of its advertising and data.
What you control, and where
| Area | Where in your Business Account | What you decide |
|---|---|---|
| Inventory | Grow > On Site and Off Site; Settings > Ad Configuration | Which pages and apps carry feeds, which ad servers and formats fill them |
| Shopper data | Settings > Data Sources; Settings > Setup Single Sign On | What leaves your account, where it goes, and how shopper identity maps to your own |
| Advertisers | Manage > Network; Monetize > Paid Partnership | Which brands join, with what access, at what price, paid how |
| Creative | Curate; Grow > Email; the Genuin Studio tools in the app | Where videos come from and when they publish |
| Governance | Settings > Manage User Roles, Brand Guidelines, Linkout Controls; Moderate | Who on your team does what, what gets through, where links can go |
| Measurement | Report | What counts, by hour, surface, post, and partner |
Inventory on pages you own
A placement on a product page reads that page, or the product URL your site passes, and fills itself with matching videos. An embed on a category or editorial page does the same for its topic. See Deliver contextual feeds with page, user, and location context. Your apps get the same feeds through the SDKs (Embed support by platform), and your hosted social experience runs on a domain you own (Set up a white-label domain).
What fills the ad slots in those feeds is set under Settings > Ad Configuration. A preset names the ad server: Google Ad Manager, InfyTV, Triton, or a custom VAST or VMAP endpoint. It picks the format: in-stream pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll, in-feed, or display and native. It orders the demand waterfall and falls back to house content when nothing fills. Presets apply globally or to chosen embeds and placements. Beyond your own pages, posts can run on publisher partners' pages through IAB standard tags; see Turn community posts into ad creatives for partner sites.
Shopper data that stays yours
Targeting runs on what shoppers tell you and what you already know. Interest selection is one of the onboarding prompts in the player. The AI then builds an interest profile from what each shopper watches and joins; see Use interest data for personalized recommendations. Your site or app can pass its own segments, such as an age range or a loyalty tier, with each request. Genuin uses them for that session without storing the profile.
The data also flows out, on your schedule. Settings > Data Sources sends engagement and zero-party data to Google BigQuery, Amazon S3 as CSV or Parquet, or Mixpanel, daily, weekly, or monthly. With single sign-on, a member is the same person as your store account, so the export joins to your customer records. Nothing is inferred from tracking on other sites; see How privacy and consent work with zero-party data.
Advertisers on your terms
Manage > Network groups partner brands as Retail Brands, Consumer Brands, and Media & Entertainment Brands, and labels each relationship: My Brand, House Brand for a subsidiary, In-Network Brand, Partner, or Aspire to Partner. Endemic brands, the ones already on your shelves, and non-endemic brands you invite for reach come in the same way: an invitation, a content access setting, a CPM floor, and an access period, and nothing is shared until the brand accepts. See How retailers add endemic and invite non-endemic brands and How invitations work.
Sponsors then buy Partnered Post, Partnered Takeover, Session Takeover, or In Stream Ads on your communities, priced by CPM with an impression counted after 3 seconds of play. Payouts run as Genuin Payout, Publisher Direct Payout, or Retail Media Trade, the last of which settles against your retail media agreement. See Set up a community sponsorship.
Creative without the bottleneck
Video inventory needs a steady supply of video, and most of it comes from people who aren't your team:
- Sellers and creators post into groups inside your communities. Groups (the original article calls them Loops) are created in the app by hand or with Auto Create, which writes the name and description from a topic. See Create groups and publish videos in the app.
- Your own catalogue comes in through bulk uploads, Clip It for long product videos, and social imports on a Scheduler.
- AI fills the gaps: avatar videos generated from a keyword, and a GenAI assistant in Curate that proposes topics, keywords, and matching videos for a community. See How AI works in Genuin Studio and How AI works in your Business Account.
Every post, whoever made it, is scored and transcribed on the way in, and waits in Curate until you approve it.
Governance
- People. Settings > Manage User Roles grants permissions per section, so a media seller can work in Monetize and Manage > Network without reaching Moderate or Settings.
- Content. Brand guidelines you write are applied by the AI moderator to every post, including partner brands' posts on your surfaces. The queue under Moderate is where you keep or remove them.
- Links. Settings > Linkout Controls decides which domains a video can link to, from My Own Brand Domains only up to any relevant domain. It also sets how the link-out button looks and when it appears. Manage > Links blocks a single link or a whole domain. See Control what viewers see and can do on embedded videos.
Measurement
Report reads every view, spark, comment, share, repost, and link click against your brand: daily, weekly, and monthly users, views by channel, OS, and country, completion rate, retention, churn, and the Real Time tab by hour. Earnings and Spendings sit beside them, each post has its own analytics, and each embed its own tab. See Track content interactions in Report and Track programmatic ad performance.
Limitations
- Exports are one-way. Data Sources pushes Genuin data to your warehouse; it doesn't ingest campaign data from other platforms.
- Segments stay yours. Audience segments are passed per request by your site or app; there's no segment builder in your Business Account.
- Permissions are per section, not per campaign.
- Three export destinations: BigQuery, S3, and Mixpanel.
