Cracking the Code on Incrementality in Brick-and-Mortar
While marketers have always pursued incremental sales lift, there’s never been a greater focus on leveraging “incrementality” as there is today with retail media networks working to enhance their offerings to brand advertisers. As Instacart’s Ali Miller recently stated, incrementality is the “gold standard in terms of showing the actual impact or causal impact of ads on driving sales.”
The problem facing brands and brick-and-mortar retailers – where upward of 85% of grocery, health and beauty are sold – is that incremental sales measurement has long been a bit of a guessing game. Historically, it’s been difficult to attribute a particular marketing investment directly in stores due to intervening factors that impact sales, such as seasonality or competitor actions. And unlike e-commerce retailers that use site analytics to track individual shopper behavior and run constant A/B tests, what happens inside brick-and-mortar stores has historically not been fully understood and has been nearly impossible to influence in real-time. However, that is changing rapidly.
CoolerX (formerly known as Cooler Screens) represents a new generation of technology that gives retailers the ability to reach in-store shoppers with dynamic digital advertising across multiple channels, including grocery, drug store, c-store, travel centers and financial services. This fast-growing new platform enables CPG marketers – who sell most of their products in these channels – to influence behavior precisely at the moment shoppers are at the point of decision. For example, CoolerX offers an AI-enabled platform in stores that gives brands the kind of precision targeting and data-driven analytics previously possible only in e-commerce. And with that precision and insight comes the ability to measure incremental sales lifts directly in stores. As your brand approaches the new world of in-store digital retail media, here are four considerations:
Think differently about scale.
Media buyers often think of scale in terms of audience reach. But an additional, useful way to think of scale in retail stores is addressable sales. That’s because this is an audience of active shoppers in the midst of their purchase decisions, with purchase intent already established. And that audience adds up to significant scale. For example, the CoolerX network currently covers $5.7 billion in addressable sales in large categories like beverage, ice cream, frozen foods, candy, OTC health, beauty, personal care, and many more. And with its growing relationship with Kroger in place, that addressable market is expected to grow by four to five times in 2025.
Plan with precision.
In-store retail media performs more like highly targeted digital media than most current forms of in-store marketing. The CoolerX AI-enabled platform can address more than 12,000 precise audience micro-segments built on hundreds of factors, each one a critical piece of the puzzle to anticipating shopper intent. CoolerX predicts intent in ways previously only available to online retailers. But rather than using personal information, CoolerX applies AI-enabled algorithms to demographic, psychographic, and contextual data, along with real-time behavioral data, to dynamically serve the right content at the right time while protecting consumer privacy. This drives performance against a range of different KPIs: brand awareness, conversion, trial and, of course, incremental sales.
Measure incremental sales.
With this new level of precision, in combination with first-party data, the CoolerX platform cracks the code on incrementality in brick-and-mortar retailers. By isolating the impact of media buys with time-stamped exposures in multiple test-and-control studies, brands running advertising on the CoolerX network have generated an average of 5%-8% incremental sales lift. In some cases, it can go even higher. A well-known premium ice cream brand generated 9.9% incremental sales for its featured product and 7.4% across the portfolio. Another brand reported 13.5% incremental sales by focusing on placements near high-intent shoppers. And these buys also proved to be an efficient media investment, with attributed incremental ROAS well above category averages.
Gain flexibility in planning and buying.
CoolerX provides the ability to identify and plan against custom audiences, forecast accurately to manage budgets, and continually optimize campaigns against multiple KPIs. Being able to continually adjust the overall portfolio mix based on results makes this a valuable tool for marketers managing large portfolios of brands and products. And buys can be placed directly with CoolerX or programmatically.
As marketers face ever-tightening budgets and ever-increasing expectations for measurable outcomes, demonstrating incremental results is becoming more critical in all channels, including in-store retail media. The CoolerX platform is showing itself to be a powerful new tool for driving incremental sales at scale, with precision targeting, while bringing the holy grail of online incrementality into brick-and-mortar.