Kroger and Disney unite retail media and streaming datasets

Retailer Kroger has struck a deal with Disney Advertising for sharing first-party behavioural data to target streaming audiences and measurement, such as eventual sales and conversions at the household level, AdExchanger reports.

Why it matters

Retail media is one of the major breakout trends of the last few years, spurred by the drawn-out death of the cookie and other significant limitations to ad targeting and measurement in the name of privacy. This all takes place against a backdrop of inflation, which has pushed hard on margins and forced marketers to justify their spending decisions even more thoroughly.

But this news speaks to a recent finding that a lot of retail media spending was actually more like repurposed trade spend and was not, in fact, incremental – a finding called the “performance plughole” by WARC’s Paul Stringer. Quite simply, a partnership with a premium publisher (such as Disney) opens up far greater capabilities while making advertising fun again.

Details

• The partnership, between Kroger Precision Marketing, its retail media arm, and Disney will only focus on the US, where Kroger caters to 60m households each year, while Disney streams to around 100m households.
• Currently in a beta testing phase (using only Hulu inventory), the partnership aims to make their joint service available to advertisers in H2, but early results have shown “statistically significant” lifts in sales and penetration for CPG clients, according to Kroger.
• The plan is to use LiveRamp to share user-level IDs for targeting and then to feed back measurement data in order to connect ad exposures to sales (or whichever other measure the client desires).

A deeper trend

As with the broader retail media trend, the rationale as told to Adexchanger revolves around the demand among advertiser clients for an even more direct line of measurement. “We need a new proof point we can share with our customers,” explained Danielle Brown, SVP of data enablement and category strategy at Disney.

Sourced from AdExchanger, WARC