Retail media & data

Ship this quarter

2 MIN READ

What if your shipping boxes had a rate card?

Liquid Death sold its case boxes as ad space. Yours land on the right doorsteps and stay blank.

Every box you ship is a billboard you already paid for and left empty.

Liquid Death sold its case boxes as ad space and pitched the reach as bigger than the Super Bowl, per Ad Age in February 2024. The claim is a claim, but the demand side is not in question. Insert programs have been buying access to other brands' parcels for years, at low rates, with almost no creative control. You have better inventory than an insert and you are giving it away.

Building it is mostly a sales exercise. Start with a media kit: monthly parcel volume, geographic split, category, average order value, and the buyer profile a partner is actually renting. Then define the slots. Exterior panel, interior lid print, and a physical insert are 3 different products at 3 different prices. Give each partner a unique QR and landing path per flight so attribution exists at all. Manage partners, slots, and flight dates as metaobjects so ops can see which box design is shipping in which window.

The catch is that your box is your brand, and you are about to rent your best doorstep moment to someone else's discount code. Vet partners the way you would vet a collaboration, not the way you would fill an ad slot. Print lead times are the second constraint: box runs take weeks, so you are selling inventory you cannot reprice or pull once it is on the pallet.

Expect attribution to be thinner than any paid social dashboard you are used to. Price the slot on reach and audience quality, not on last click, and say that out loud in the pitch so nobody is disappointed in month 2.

You already run a distribution channel that gets opened by hand, in the buyer's home, with their full attention. You have simply never put a rate card on it.

Take this further

The build here is small and the selling is the hard part. Whether your parcel volume adds up to something worth a rate card is the first question. Let's work through it together.

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Proof point

Ad Age, Feb 2024. Every insert program since proves the demand side exists.

Build on Shopify

Media kit + QR attribution + partner slots managed in metaobjects.

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