Ecommerce platform Rakuten France, a subsidiary of Japanese technology conglomerate Rakuten, started out on its retail media journey way back in 2013 – just a year after Amazon launched the first online retail media network.
Back then, Rakuten didn’t call it retail media and the focus was only on sponsored ads.
“We developed our own in-house solution. It was pretty simple, pretty efficient. It was only sponsored ads, no banners, no CPM formats,” said Kristina Raptovaia, Head of Partnerships & Advertising at Rakuten France, speaking at the Mirakl Cabana at Cannes Lions 2025. “We didn’t really have a big focus for merchants. They were just able to create their campaigns by choosing keywords to push the products they wanted to push.”
This technology was then adapted for marketplaces, helping Rakuten to increase the relevancy of ads shown in the marketplace and to create a smoother experience for merchants.
The third iteration came when Rakuten would eventually begin talking about retail media. That was around 2019/2020, and that’s when “we really started to talk about the fact that not only sellers need visibility on the marketplace, but also external brands, because they see our commerce as a true media channel,” Raptovaia added.
This led to the realisation that Rakuten would be best served having a single platform to address both merchants and brands. A unified advertising solution was needed, so Rakuten decided to engage Mirakl.
Unlocking retail media’s potential
Mirakl, which started life as an online marketplace software platform more than a decade ago, and now powers more than 450 marketplaces around the world, launched its Ads business back in 2022, recognising the retail media opportunity.
Anne Hallock, VP of Sales, Americas at Mirakl Ads, shared data highlighting how between 3% and 5% of third-party sellers’ gross merchandise value is reinvested in retail media, compared to between 1% and 2% for the average advertiser. Meanwhile, leaders in the market, such as Walmart or Amazon, are seeing mid- to long-tail advertisers driving 85% of their retail media revenue.
“In every retail media network that I work with, that revenue leader is being told to go activate the long tail. And the response is usually ‘I don’t know how. How am I supposed to do that?’ And, so, the Mirakl Ads technology was really developed to support that,” said Hallock.
The platform also conducted research with Forrester that found that having ads activated within the marketplace creates a richer customer experience.
“If you’re going onsite, you’re searching for a particular product, and there is no surfacing of that product in sponsored content, it’s actually less helpful,” Hallock explained. “If I’m an Amazon shopper, I go in and look for information, I find it helpful that information is being surfaced onsite.”
However, this wasn’t quite enough to convince Rakuten that Mirakl had the tools to produce results. So, a test was run, before Rakuten was able to put its faith in Mirakl to power its retail media strategy.
This proof of concept saw Mirakl achieve +83% higher ad response rates, +60% in ad inventory fill rates, +53% stronger monetisation performance, and +25% more relevant impressions across one of Rakuten’s categories.
Can’t ignore offsite
The latest evolution of this collaboration is set to launch in July 2025, with Mirakl working with Symbiosys to bring onsite and offsite retail media together for Rakuten.
Symbiosys, which was recently acquired by DoorDash, focuses on the middle of the funnel and the running of retail media campaigns on platforms such as Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Pinterest.
“There’s a lot of technology and infrastructure supporting onsite retail media, and onsite has been a great driver of growth in the ad sector. Over the last five years, it’s the number one growth driver, if you look across the whole sector. It’s unlocked a huge opportunity for consumer brands and marketplace sellers to reach the user at the point of purchase. So, there’s very strong performance for that, because they’re there to buy a product,” said Bashar Kachachi, Founder and CEO at Symbiosys.
Kachachi built the company based on the principle that onsite is “inherently limited,” so decided to build a way to help retailers and retail media networks to play across the full funnel.
“Where are users beginning their shopping journeys? It’s really across different places. They’re active on Google doing product research. They’re on YouTube and TikTok watching product review videos. And they’re engaging in social commerce on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and places like that,” Kachachi added. “Our mission is to really help retailers and marketplaces incorporate that into a media network, and to help brands run campaigns across those channels, leveraging retailers’ first-party data.”
In a world where 60%-70% of ecommerce retailers’ marketing budgets are allocated to acquisition, Rakuten will work with both Mirakl and Symbiosys to reduce its customer acquisition costs.
“What Symbiosys is doing with Mirakl Ads is really a big opportunity for us, because we can reduce our customer acquisition costs. By this, we actually get this viable effect, because we help our sellers to get more sales, because we drive the sales from outside, we attract new customers, and we do this by reducing our own costs,” said Raptovaia.
“We will launch beginning of July, and we’ll see how we can increase this opportunity to get new customers by reducing our budget.”
