The Power of the Transaction

By Becky Johnson, Advertising Week Writer & Podcast Host

A click can suggest interest, but a transaction shows where someone chose to spend. In our Advertising Week New York session, “The Power of the Transaction,” the leaders behind Citi Commerce Media discussed how purchasing data can help brands identify audiences, deliver relevant offers and assess what happens after an advertisement.

Quentin George, Distinguished Partner at McKinsey & Company, moderated the conversation with Pam Habner, Head of U.S. Consumer Cards; Jeff Chwast, General Manager of Citi Commerce Media; Elyse Lesley, Head of U.S. Consumer Cards Marketing; and Ben Mackinnon, Founder and CEO of Kard. The discussion examined the opportunity behind the newly launched Citi Commerce Media and the planned acquisition of Kard.

Pam opened by describing the scale supporting Citi Commerce Media. The consumer cards business served 70 million U.S. consumers, Pam said, whose spending totaled $630 billion across 6.5 billion transactions and 700 spending categories in the previous year.

That breadth creates an opportunity to understand spending across businesses and categories. Pam said the objective is to identify audiences with relevant intent, connect them with an appropriate advertisement or merchant offer and use subsequent transactions to assess the response.

“We have the transaction data that can tell the marketer, in fact, what that advertisement or that marketing placement yielded,” Pam said.

Jeff described how that information differs from other signals used in advertising. Clicks, searches and surveys can indicate what someone might want, while transactions reveal where customers spend, how often they return and what they choose to buy.

Jeff had previously used that information to help match customers with financial products. Citi Commerce Media extends the application to messages and offers from other brands, with the aim of meeting a wider range of customer needs.

Ben offered an example from Kard’s work with an unnamed advertiser. Over approximately a year and a half, the advertiser’s market share within the measured space increased from about 20% to 28%, Ben said, a relative increase of roughly 40%.

Ben said the platform’s cross-category transaction view supports both audience activation and an understanding of business performance. Rather than seeing activity within a single retailer, the data can provide insights into spending across multiple businesses.

For Elyse, that broader view addresses familiar marketing challenges: acquiring customers, building loyalty and reducing churn. Elyse described using audience intelligence to understand interests such as travel and music, then connect with customers at relevant points in their purchasing journeys.

The opportunity also involves reinforcing a message across channels and observing conversions that might otherwise be difficult to see. Elyse said those capabilities had already been useful within the consumer cards business and could support other advertisers.

The conversation then turned to the planned acquisition of Kard. Pam said the consumer cards business had already offered customers the ability to activate merchant offers through its digital channels, working with several partners.

Kard presented an opportunity to bring additional technology and capabilities in-house. Pam described combining the resources and customer relationships of an established business with Kard’s platform, data and AI capabilities.

Ben said the appeal was a shared view of how rewards should work. Relevant, contextual offers can create more value for customers, while advertisers need evidence that their investment produces business results.

Kard launched its first commerce media partnerships in 2020, Ben said. The planned combination would allow the platform to build on that work at a scale it would have struggled to reach independently.

Jeff then explained how transaction data supports campaign measurement. The same information used to build audiences can show whether customers subsequently spent with an advertiser, with results compared against a control group that did not see the advertisement.

In early pilots, customers who saw an ad spent 15% more with the advertising partner than customers in a control group, Jeff said. Jeff emphasized that the results were preliminary but encouraging.

“So really, it’s helping marketers move beyond intent and clicks and looking at real outcomes,” Jeff said.

Elyse said the value extends beyond reporting a result at the end of a campaign. Connecting audience insights, activation and transaction measurement gives advertisers information they can use to adjust subsequent activity.

That makes the process a continuing cycle of learning and optimization. Pam described the ability to refine audiences, observe spending and repeat the process as an opportunity to connect work that marketers have historically tried to coordinate across channels.

Jeff closed by inviting brands and potential partners to explore what they could build with Citi Commerce Media. The next step, Jeff said, was to apply the data and insights to a wider range of customer needs, then verify the outcomes.

Sarah Merians Photography for Advertising Week