Kroger Decouples Data With New Programmatic Solution

Kroger Precision Marketing (KPM), the retail media arm of Kroger’s 84.51 data science and loyalty subsidiary, has launched a capability allowing advertisers to activate the grocery giant’s audiences directly in their existing demand-side platform (DSP) seats. (In DSPs, seats are the licensed accounts that ad buyers are assigned to allow them to conduct transactions and access other offerings.)

The programmatic capability “pre-optimizes” Kroger purchase-based audiences and then uses the advertiser’s own inventory supply and rates for activation, according to a media release. The first iteration launches exclusively with The Trade Desk.

This feature is an evolution of KPM's existing self-service solution, which also measures ad effectiveness by matching ad exposure of custom audiences to in-story and online sales at Kroger. Now, advertisers will activate and measure campaigns within their existing seats on The Trade Desk, including display, online video and connected TV.

The Hershey Co. participated in early testing and provided feedback during product development.

“Pairing Kroger audiences within The Trade Desk reduces ad waste by weighting our impressions to the households most likely to convert,” Vinny Rinaldi, head of media and analytics, The Hershey Co., said in the release. “With a positive return-on-ad-spend, our test proves we can more actively steward programmatic campaigns by applying retail data.”

“Kroger Precision Marketing’s audience and sales insights are powerful tools that help advertisers minimize ad waste by enabling them to only reach relevant buyers and to hold advertising accountable to sales through measurement,” Ben Sylvan, vice president, data partnerships, The Trade Desk, added. “Advertisers will be able to scale verified buyer audiences across all inventory types on The Trade Desk, including connected TV.”

KPM says this product innovation was designed to provide buyers more flexibility, impact and transparency, all things advertisers are increasingly demanding from programmatic providers as cookie deprecation goes into effect next year.

• Flexible controls: Buyers can build campaigns within an existing DSP seat to choose supply and manage placements in the DSP with preferred brand safety controls and verification tags.
• Measurable impact: Buyers can measure effectiveness and enhance audiences against in-store and online Kroger sales data.
• Transparent investments: Buyers can view audience costs — decoupled from inventory and measurement.

A recent report by the Association of National Advertisers estimates advertisers waste at least $20 billion dollars annually from inefficient programmatic media, per the release. The report recommends in part that buyers measure success based on business goals, rather than just measuring typical media metrics.

“Kroger won’t wait on the sidelines for the programmatic supply chain to evolve,” Cara Pratt, senior vice president of KPM, said. “This combination of our deterministic data with flexible buyer controls has become the new model for inspiring shoppers and reducing programmatic advertising waste.”

KPM plans to expand to other demand-side and buying platforms in the future.

In the Path to Purchase Institute’s 2023 annual Trends Survey, KPM, along with Walmart Connect, Target’s Roundel and Amazon DSP were the networks our brand respondents worked with the most.

Among these networks — and among most other networks included in the survey — KPM and Amazon led the way across metrics. At least half of respondents gave KPM an “excellent/very good” (EVG) score — the highest marks — for traffic-driving capabilities and measurement capabilities, and nearly 60% gave the network an EVG rating for targeting effectiveness and data sharing.