A quick guide on how e-commerce brands can attain growth when traditional media is exhausting both spends and attention with OEM advertising.
First off, a mental exercise: Let’s rewind a few decades back to newspaper advertising. There were a fixed number of pages, limited ad slots, and a finite window of reader attention. As competition increased, brands fought harder for visibility, often paying more for less impact.
Today’s digital ecosystem looks strikingly similar.
Search results are crowded. Social feeds are saturated with ads. Media inventory has not grown at the same pace as the demand for visibility. For e-commerce and retail brands, this has created a new reality: staying visible is no longer seasonal it’s an always-on requirement.
The Limits of Search and Social Media for Ecommerce Growth
Search and social remain essential ad channels, but relying on them exclusively creates structural challenges for e-commerce and retail brands.
- Brands repeatedly reach the same high-intent users, driving up costs and reducing marginal returns.
- Most ad spend is concentrated at driving bottom-funnel marketing activity, which means brands often struggle to influence consumers earlier in their decision journey.
In highly competitive, promotion-led markets, this lack of incremental reach directly limits growth. Which makes reaching new audiences before intent fully forms a competitive necessity.
How OEM Advertising Drives Incremental Growth
The core advantage of OEM advertising is its ability to unlock incremental reach. On-device placements on smartphones help brands engage users before they actively search, remain present across the full funnel, and reach audiences that are difficult to access through search and social alone.
This is especially powerful for D2C, FMCG, and quick-commerce brands, where brand recall, frequency, and speed of decision-making directly influence conversions and repeat usage.
OEM advertising doesn’t replace existing channels; it strengthens them by reducing overreliance on lower-funnel tactics.
Rethinking Reach Through On-Device Advertising
This is why leading e-commerce and retail brands are rethinking visibility and turning to on-device (OEM) advertising as an always-on growth channel.
OEM advertising allows brands to reach consumers directly through native placements embedded within the smartphone ecosystem not inside overcrowded feeds, but across high-attention surfaces such as:
- OEM-native mobile browser start pages
- Recommendations within alternative app stores
- Preload apps during device onboarding
- System push notifications and content cards
Instead of interrupting users mid-scroll, brands appear when consumers are naturally discovering, deciding, or re-engaging. These placements integrate into the user journey rather than competing with it.
OEM Ads: A Complementary Channel with Proven Performance
OEM advertising remains relatively untapped, which is precisely why it performs. Across global campaigns, OEM inventories are capable of delivering:
- Click-through rates (CTRs) of 1%–6%
- Click-to-install rates of 20%–40% for app-first ecommerce brands
- Post-install conversion rates comparable to organic traffic
What makes these results compelling isn’t performance in isolation: it’s incrementality. Brands extend reach to users who are not actively searching yet, reinforce recall earlier, and ease pressure on search and social during peak periods.
For performance and growth teams, this translates into improved efficiency across the media mix.
Why Always-On OEM Advertising Works for Ecommerce Brands
Many e-commerce and retail brands often activate OEM advertising only during high-stakes moments such as festive sales, mega shopping days, or major app launches. While these moments remain important, limiting OEM activity to short seasonal sales spikes leaves growth potential untapped.
However, many leading brands are going against this trend today by treating OEM advertising as an always-on, full-funnel marketing channel. Continuous presence allows brands to build familiarity ahead of key sales, stay visible during quieter periods, and re-engage users contextually rather than competing only at the point of purchase.
Insights from our latest VEVE’s Ramadan Report 2026 reinforce this shift, showing that discovery and consideration often peak weeks before promotional windows begin. Brands like Grab and Tiket.com which invest to align with daily routines outperform those that activate only during the sales period itself.
This approach is already visible in practice. AJIO, one of India’s leading fashion ecommerce platforms, integrated on-device placements into its core growth strategy to extend reach beyond saturated search and social channels, driving incremental discovery while maintaining strong engagement at scale.
Across all our clients in e-commerce and retail, the pattern is clear: OEM advertising delivers its strongest impact when treated as a permanent, always-on growth channel not a short-term experiment.
How VEVE Enables Always-on Brand Growth for Ecommerce and Retail Brands
Making OEM advertising work at scale requires more than access to inventory. It requires the right formats, placements, and execution across high-intent moments.
VEVE helps e-commerce, retail, FMCG, and quick-commerce brands activate OEM advertising across premium on-device touchpoints, delivering both visibility and performance. Our ad formats include:
- Tiles: Ensure early discovery and uninterrupted reach through quick-access placements.
- Impact: Deliver high-visibility exposure with banners, interstitial and splash screens during key moments such as sales and launches.
- App Install: Drive app discovery and conversions to meet performance goals within trusted OEM ecosystems.
Driving Incremental Growth in a Saturated Digital Market
As e-commerce, FMCG, and retail markets grow more competitive globally, the brands that win will be those that invest in incremental reach, sustained visibility, and smarter audience engagement. On-device advertising offers a rare combination of scale, performance, and differentiation in a crowded digital ecosystem.
At VEVE, we’ve helped thousands of brands globally unlock this potential by integrating OEM advertising into their always-on growth strategies, driving measurable impact across awareness, engagement, and conversions throughout the year.
