CTV added to Kroger’s retail media business

CPG brands and agencies tapping into supermarket chain Kroger’s retail media offering now have access to CTV and video for their campaigns. These new channels are available through Kroger’s self-serve Private Marketplace, which was launched in 2021.

The addition of CTV shows how far retail media businesses have come in supporting omnichannel campaigns for brands. This week, Walmart added easier self-service to its Walmart Connect offering.

Dig deeper: Why we care about retail media networks

Reaching CTV households. Kroger serves 60 million U.S. households, and many of them also watch streaming content. Brands can serve CTV ads to these households with Kroger’s first-party sales data and integrate CTV into a programmatic campaign using the advertiser’s, or agency’s, preferred ad-buying platform.

Brands can also measure the campaign’s impact on sales within Kroger Precision Marketing (KPM) by analyzing store sales at Kroger’s.

Retail data. Advertisers and agencies can use the retail data within KPM to find audiences while accessing premium inventory through programmatic suppliers like Magnite, OpenX, PubMatic, and Xandr.

“Our retail data precisely reaches households — such as lapsed or infrequent brand buyers — and then matches advertising exposure to store sales to measure brand impact,” said Cara Pratt, SVP, Kroger Precision Marketing, in a company release.

Why we care. The sales data that retailers have on their customers is certainly valuable to brands. But what about the brand’s customers, who shop at multiple retailers and through any number of online channels? In any one retail media network, the brand sees only a fragment of their customers and must, then, patch it all up together by maintaining a presence on the other retailers’ networks.

The net effect, then, is more walled gardens and fragmentation. And more ad revenue, as brands will be left trying to out-advertise their competitors on each retail network.

Of course, there are ways that retailers can use these networks to boost in-store experience. That’s what ad relevance is all about, reaching customers at the right time.