Retail Media Networks Drive Ad Outcomes for Brands: Kroger’s Halli Goddard

Can KPM help CPGs hit KPIs using CTV? If you’ll excuse the acronym soup, the answer appears to be “YES.”

Kroger is the latest retailer leveraging its own customer loyalty data to help brands buy winning ad campaigns.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Halli Goddard, Advanced TV Lead, Kroger Precision Marketing (KPM), explains why more ad buyers are looking for certainty.

Proof in the pudding

“Every brand’s advertising budget is under pressure right now. – they need to prove performance,” Goddard tells Rob Williams, senior editor for Beet.TV.

“Retail media networks as a whole offer that solution.”

Goddard is speaking about the new trend in which retailers like Kroger begin leveraging their check-out data and their in-store and online real estate to sell ads that are not only targeted, they also demonstrate real cause and effect.

“They’re able to share not just the traditional media metrics that they’re used to seeing, but also business outcomes and business impact to the bottom line,” Goddard adds.

Kroger’s growth

Kroger Precision Marketing launched in 2017, early in the evolution of retail media networks.

Powered by 84.51°, a company specialized in helping retailers, agencies and publishers unlock retail assets for advertising, it boasts data from 60 million households. Its ads can be delivered through Kroger.com, partner websites and Kroger’s MyMagazine platform.

It all works because Kroger captures customer-linked data on 96% of in-store and online purchases, Goddard says.

“It’s our self-service programmatic platform,” Goddard says. “What we’ve been able to do here is create a platform that is DSP-agnostic. We want you to be able to use your existing tech stack.

“We launched with display inventory. We’ve recently added video and we are expanding this to connected TVs as well shortly.”

CTV closes the loop

Connected TV (CTV) is now a major area of focus for KPM.

The organization has a partnership with Roku to help ad buyers execute through the channel.

Goddard explains: “We’re able to leverage the over 60 million households that we have here at Kroger with the over 60 million households that Roku has with their active accounts and deterministically target consumers based off of what they purchase, run campaigns on Roku, and then, on the back end, match that to an outcome, whether or not they purchased the product.”

All of which means it is increasingly possible to yield metrics like:

  • household penetration.
  • category share shift.
  • incremental and attributable sales.

KPM and Roku managed to achieve an 8% household penetration uplift for Johnson & Johnson’s skincare brand Neutrogena when they found Roku users who saw a mid-2021 ad for towelettes spent 4.2x more on the products than average Kroger households.

The takeaway? “CPGs should be looking at using their own first party data,” Goddard adds.

You are watching “Transforming CTV: Delivering a Better Ad Experience for Viewers,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Beachfront. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.