Some of the most valuable digital advertising is no longer sold the traditional way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is sold by retailers, marketplaces and other data-rich businesses that know what their customers actually buy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is commerce media, advertising built on real first-party purchase data rather than broad assumptions, and it has become one of the fastest-growing parts of the market. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tens of billions of rand move through digital advertising in the country each year, and a rising share of it is chasing these audiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There has been a catch that held the category back, on both sides of the deal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
For a brand or its agency, reaching those audiences has meant striking a separate arrangement with every data owner, one negotiation and one plan at a time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
For the data owners themselves, finding demand has been just as hard: their audiences sold largely to the brands they already trade with, with no simple way to reach the rest of the market. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The value was never in doubt. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Connecting the two was slow, manual and hard to measure, so supply grew faster than any easy way to buy or sell it, and much of the opportunity stayed on the table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Flow Platform<\/strong><\/a> has changed that with a first of its kind for the industry. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Its Audience Marketplace 2.0<\/a><\/strong> brings first-party audiences and the campaign packages that data owners build into a single marketplace where advertisers can discover, book and measure them in one place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Hundreds of audience segments from more than 35 data partners, including businesses like Woolworths, ARC and Bash, now sit together, ready to buy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For advertisers, that means a campaign that once took weeks to assemble can be planned and activated in minutes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For the retailers, marketplaces and platforms that own the data, it opens a new revenue stream: their audiences are put in front of far more demand than the brands they already deal with, earning additional revenue without building any technology of their own, and without ever exposing raw customer data. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It is the connection the market has been missing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The commercial case is already being proved. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In Q4 of 2025, Pokerbet’s campaign on Flow delivered a 156% return on ad investment from 2.67 million impressions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Over a competitive Black Friday, Nivea reached 60 times more high-intent shoppers at a 32% lower cost per click. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Est\u00e9e Lauder grew sales by 71%, and Veuve and Mo\u00ebt saw a 53% lift in sales value over the festive season. <\/p>\n\n\n\n First-party data performs, once buyers can actually get to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “For years, South Africa’s problem was never a shortage of valuable first-party data audiences. It was that nobody could buy them properly, and the businesses that owned them had no easy way to sell them,” says Gil Sperling<\/a><\/strong>, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Flow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “No one, anywhere, has brought the audiences, the partner packages and the planning together the way Audience Marketplace 2.0 does. Tens of billions of rand move through digital advertising every year.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We are opening the door for far more of it to reach the audiences that drive sales, and for the businesses behind that data to earn from it. That changes what this whole market can do.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The timing is not incidental. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As marketers set budgets for the year ahead and scrutinise every line item, the ability to buy commerce media quickly, and to prove what it returned, is what will decide how much of it gets funded. <\/p>\n\n\n\n South Africa is still early in building this market, which gives it a rare chance to get the plumbing right from the start rather than bolt it on later, as more mature markets have had to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Audience Marketplace 2.0 is where demand meets data. It turns the hardest part of commerce media, getting hold of it, into the easiest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Explore Flow’s Audience Marketplace 2.0<\/strong><\/a>, or book a demo<\/strong><\/a> and the team will walk you through it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Commerce Media, in full Flow.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Flow’s Audience Marketplace 2.0 brings first-party audiences and the campaign packages that data owners build into a single marketplace where advertisers can discover, book and measure them in one place. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":865413,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"posted","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"2074777279616487555","_sma_x_attempts":1,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10459],"tags":[2328,25408,25729,25730,23282,307],"class_list":["post-865411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-industry-news","tag-ads","tag-agency","tag-audience-marketplace-2-0","tag-demo","tag-flow","tag-marketing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=865411"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865411\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":865754,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865411\/revisions\/865754"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/865413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=865411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=865411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=865411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n