Summary
Sam’s Club Member Access Platform (MAP) and its Sponsored Brand Amplifier offer brands a powerful way to boost visibility and connect with high-intent customers. By leveraging prime ad placement, brands can showcase their logos, taglines, and top products, ensuring they capture attention early in the shopping journey. With its ability to track both online and in-store sales, this tool maximizes return on ad spend (ROAS) by connecting online engagement to offline purchases, making it an essential part of any retail media strategy.
Retail media continues to grow and evolve, and as part of this evolution, we’re seeing the diversification of retail media networks (RMNs) into categories like omnichannel, grocery, specialty, etc. Today, retail media marketers often focus on a few well-established RMNs, but the landscape is shifting.
What we’re likely to see next is a broader adoption of a diversified portfolio of networks, allowing marketers to tap into unique audiences, leverage specialized capabilities, and optimize performance across multiple platforms for more comprehensive and effective campaigns.
As we shared in a previous Skai post, Elevating Your Retail Strategy: The Role of Membership Warehouse Clubs in Omnichannel Retail Media Success, membership-based retail media networks like Sam’s Club Member Access Platform (MAP) are uniquely positioned to offer marketers unparalleled insight into member behavior. With access to online and offline shopping data, these platforms empower brands to create more personalized and effective advertising campaigns.
Now, Sam’s Club MAP offers a powerful tool for brand growth: Sponsored Brand Amplifier. This high-visibility placement allows advertisers to showcase their logos, taglines, and multiple items at the top of search results and browse pages. By capturing attention early in the member journey, Sponsored Brand Amplifier helps drive item awareness and consideration while also offering direct add-to-cart functionality.
Today, we explore the benefits of using Sam’s Club MAP Sponsored Brand Amplifier, how it can connect online and offline shopping behaviors, and how it helps maximize return on ad spend (ROAS).
What Is Sponsored Brand Amplifier?
Sponsored Brand Amplifier is a premium ad format available through Sam’s Club Member Access Platform (MAP), designed to maximize brand visibility and engagement across multiple touchpoints. These ads appear in prime locations, such as the top of search results and browse pages, ensuring that brands capture the attention of high-intent members early in their buying journey. The placement helps brands establish a strong presence during crucial moments of item discovery and consideration.
What sets Sponsored Brand Amplifier apart is its flexibility and tailored branding options. Advertisers can showcase their logo, tagline, and up to four key items in a single ad. This visually engaging format allows brands to control how their items are presented, providing the opportunity to highlight hero items or promote new offerings. The result is a high-impact ad that not only drives awareness but also encourages member engagement, which can improve organic search rankings as more members interact with the brand.
These ads are available across desktop, mobile, and app platforms.. Whether members are browsing on their phone or desktop, brands maintain consistent visibility across all digital channels. Sponsored Brand Amplifier ensures that brands remain at the top of the member’s minds throughout their journey, driving both online and offline sales.
Sponsored Brand Amplifier helps brands connect with high-intent members and drive measurable results by combining premium ad placement, tailored branding, and cross-platform availability.
Benefits of Sam’s Club MAP Sponsored Brand Amplifier
Sponsored Brand Amplifier provides advertisers with a unique opportunity to boost visibility, connect online engagement to offline sales, and maximize return on ad spend (ROAS). These high-impact ads are strategically placed to ensure that brands reach their target audience at key moments in the shopping journey. Let’s dive into the three major benefits of utilizing Sponsored Brand Amplifier through Sam’s Club MAP.
Enhanced brand visibility
Sponsored Brand Amplifier is designed to place your brand at the forefront of member searches. These ads occupy prime spots at the top of search results and browse pages, ensuring high-intent customers see your items early in their shopping journey. This prominent positioning is key to driving brand awareness, especially in competitive retail environments where visibility is everything. By appearing at critical decision-making moments, brands can engage members before they’ve had the chance to consider alternatives. This high-impact placement significantly improves your chances of influencing the member’s path to purchase.
The visibility advantage extends across multiple platforms, including desktop, mobile, and app environments. Whether your members are browsing at home or on the go, your brand remains consistently visible across Sam’s Club’s entire digital ecosystem. Sponsored Brand Amplifier offers flexibility in how brands present their items, allowing up to four featured items alongside logos and taglines. This tailored branding format helps brands control their narrative while improving organic search rankings as members interact with the ads. This is an important aspect of offline performance because nearly a quarter of consumers research products online before buying it in-store.
Connecting online engagement to offline sales
One of the standout features of Sam’s Club MAP is its ability to connect online engagement to offline sales. As members increasingly switch between digital and physical shopping, tracking the member journey across channels has become essential for brands. Sam’s Club MAP provides closed-loop attribution, meaning advertisers can track when an online ad leads to an in-club purchase. This allows brands to fully understand how their campaigns drive results both online and in-store, offering a more complete picture of their performance. For Sam’s Club MAP advertisers, overall ROAS has increased an average of nearly 36% (MAP Campaign Data 2023) since adding in-club sales to the attribution mix.
The ability to attribute offline sales to digital ads gives brands deeper insights into the members’ behavior, enabling smarter, more effective campaign strategies. With 84% of consumers expecting retailers to integrate their online and offline channels, this seamless connection is crucial. Sam’s Club MAP ensures that brands don’t miss out on capturing and optimizing these interactions, making their campaigns more efficient and impactful. Advertisers can finally track and adjust based on real-world data, ensuring their investments are delivering results across all touchpoints.
Maximizing return on ad spend (ROAS)
Leveraging Sponsored Brand Amplifier through Sam’s Club MAP can significantly improve return on ad spend. This ad placement capitalizes on both the digital and physical shopping behaviors of Sam’s Club members, enabling brands to stretch their ad budgets further while driving measurable performance. The ability to track online ads and connect them to in-club purchases further maximizes the efficiency of advertising spend.
The optimization tools available through Sam’s Club MAP allow brands to fine-tune their campaigns in real-time, ensuring ad spend is directed to the most effective opportunities. Skai’s platform integrates advanced features like rules-based bidding and bulk editing, empowering advertisers to manage campaigns more efficiently across Sam’s Club and other retail networks. These tools help brands optimize their strategy continuously, ensuring that their investments yield the highest possible returns. By utilizing Sponsored Brand Amplifier, brands can improve their visibility and increase their campaign’s overall profitability.
How Skai’s retail media solutions amplify Sam’s Club MAP Sponsored Brand Amplifier
Skai offers a powerful suite of tools designed to enhance the impact of Sam’s Club MAP Sponsored Brand Amplifier. These tools, organized into four key categories, provide marketers with the advanced capabilities needed to drive performance and maximize ROI across all retail channels:
AI-powered optimization
Skai’s AI-powered optimization tools, such as Skai Portfolios & Budget Navigator and AI Dayparting, automate bidding, budgeting, and intraday optimizations to ensure Sponsored Brand Amplifier is delivered at the most impactful times and placements. With automated negative keyword analysis and powerful bid adjustments, your Sponsored Brand Amplifier will always be optimized for maximum performance and visibility.
Versatile metrics and reporting
With tools like Custom Metrics and Dashboard Reporting, Skai provides deep insights into how Sponsored Brand Amplifier is performing. You can measure specific metrics that matter to your brand, analyze them in customizable dashboards, and export reports to share across teams. Skai’s Decision Pro helps unify this data for smarter, more informed decisions that drive results.
Connective actionability
Skai’s Advanced Automated Actions and Automated Keyword Harvesting streamline campaign management by automatically adjusting bids, budgets, and keywords. These features ensure that your Sponsored Brand Amplifier is always being fine-tuned to meet performance goals without requiring constant manual adjustments, allowing you to focus on scaling successful strategies.
Digital shelf intelligence
Skai’s Competitive Insights and Powerful Integrations combine advertising and digital shelf data, giving marketers a holistic view of the retail landscape. With insights into both advertised and non-advertised keywords, you can optimize your Sponsored Brand Amplifier to capture more market share and connect advertising efforts with overall brand health. Skai also allows for seamless workflow optimizations across multiple data points, ensuring that your campaigns are constantly improving based on real-time insights.
Adopt a diversified RMN strategy to drive performance
As retail media continues to evolve, the diversification of Retail Media Networks (RMNs) is becoming more pronounced. Each RMN offers its own advantages and knowing when and why to leverage one network over another will be critical for marketers seeking to drive specific campaign goals—generating awareness, fostering consideration, or pushing conversions.
The likely path forward for marketers will involve a more diversified portfolio of RMNs, and Sam’s Club MAP will play a significant role in that mix. With its ability to connect online and offline shopping behaviors, Sam’s Club MAP, and its Sponsored Brand Amplifier, offer a unique opportunity for brands to capture high-intent members in an omnichannel environment.
No matter which RMNs you choose to include in your strategy, Skai can help you optimize and scale your efforts. Skai’s powerful retail media solutions are designed to amplify performance across every channel, giving you the tools needed to drive measurable results and make the most out of your investments in retail media.
We invite you to schedule a brief demo with our team to see all of our cutting-edge retail media innovation firsthand to make the most of your Sam’s Club MAP campaigns and 100+ retailer media networks.
