Kroger Precision Marketing Leans Into Purchase Data to Elevate Media Accountability
As the retail media industry grapples with calls for standardization, Kroger Precision Marketing (KPM) is leaning into the value of purchase data and strengthening its relationship with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) to standardize that across all media.
A deliberate double-down for 2025, the moves serve as extensions of KPM’s founding business proposition and strategy, explained Cara Pratt, KPM SVP, to P2PI during January’s CES show in Las Vegas. Truly demonstrating the value of purchase data to CPGs means more than showcasing a wealth of consumer behavior signals; it’s also committing to media accountability.
“The longitudinal understanding of that behavior provides really important signals to predict behavior and to nicely create human connection and relevant, responsible ways for advertising,” Pratt said.
As such, KPM wants to reduce friction across the myriad systems and platforms fueling today’s retail landscape, and acknowledges that these decisions will ultimately impact its brand and agency partners.
“We know that we have to be influencers into brands and their agency partners with respect to practices and processes that they've created for years that now need to be disintermediated to unleash the value of this data,” Pratt said.
[Related: See where KPM sits in the Omnichannel Landscape]
Anyone who works with data knows the commerce marketing industry could be in for a marathon-long, uphill battle (in the rain). Beyond tech adoption challenges, businesses are anchored by historical silos and legacy working rhythms, Pratt said. Layer on misaligned KPIs, and it’s easy to find yourself wading through seas of organizational tension. Winning requires effort, intentionality and, most of all, consistency.
“At the end of the day, we feel confident that retail data is a great activator to make sure the performance can be delivered earlier in the awareness cycle of what brands are looking to do — create demand, convert demand,” she stressed. “As those two continue to work together, these retail data signals are really important on who to expose what to, and then how to take action and how to understand the effectiveness of that action.”
Stepping Up Standardization
KPM has been an active partner with IAB since 2021 to standardize media measurement using purchase data. The company announced in December it would make incremental sales reporting available for self-service programmatic campaigns placed through The Trade Desk. The methodology is designed to adhere to IAB standards and distinguish attributable sales from incremental sales.
Pratt said that as one of the larger IAB partners in this effort, KPM feels responsible to set and elevate the industry standard in digital media marketing metrics, with the expectation that other retailers will meet Kroger at this higher level. KPM’s access to transaction data serves as an opportunity to set standards for brands.
While today’s brands are motivated to align with a standard, they recognize the glut of inconsistency, according to Pratt.
“I think they'd love to land a standard. However, there's recognition of the assets that are accessible across not just retailer ecosystems, but out of different publisher ecosystems and different buying platforms,” she said. “We need to pause for a moment, identify what’s working and what's not working, and then reset this new wave. And we need to allow us a level of flexibility for brands as well that goes well beyond flexibility on attribution windows.”
Expanding Sustainability
KPM has been a rare voice in the relationship between effective retail media and advancing an organization's sustainability goals. These benefits are framed under the thought process that audience signals can drive more effective buys, which in turn can reduce the total number of impressions pushed to the marketplace — and thus decrease the amount of energy used.
A partnership with reporting solution provider Scope 3 measures the carbon performance associated with offsite media campaigns placed through KPM. Since partnering, the average carbon emitted on KPM’s campaigns is 37% lower than an average programmatic media campaign, according to Pratt.
The company intends to expand its relationship with Scope 3 this year.
“We know we're not going to solve global warming through this,” she notes. “There's a lot of other things that are impacting that, of course, but we know we can do our part, and it's just being good stewards in this industry.”