CANNES — Albertsons Cos. is the first grocer in the United States to collaborate with ad-tech company The Trade Desk on helping brands to better see the effect of digital advertising on customer sales. Albertsons Media Collective, the retail media arm of the grocery giant, will provide advertisers with insights and metrics to optimize their campaigns, according to an announcement.
Unlike other retail media networks that have their own demand-side platform (DSP) for programmatic media buying, Albertsons is offering advertisers the ability to manage campaigns within The Trade Desk umbrella.
“What we’re hearing in the industry is that media buyers don’t need another platform that they have to click into,” Kristi Argyilan, senior vice president of retail media at Albertsons, said in this interview at the Beet Villa during the Cannes International Festival of Creativity. “They want retail media networks to integrate into the places where they’re making other buying decisions.”
With a footprint of more than 2,275 grocery stores across the United States, Albertsons has frequent contact with millions of shoppers.
“It’s a very large company that knows about 106 million consumers that come into their stores multiple times in a week,” Argyilan said. “It’s super-exciting to be at a company at that scale that is a reasonably white canvas for us to come in and build off of what the retail media networks have done before.”
Omnichannel Growth
Albertsons has a vast trove of data about people’s buying habits, which underwent a significant shift as the pandemic led many people to order groceries for delivery or pickup. The information has become more valuable as advertisers seek to improve their ad campaigns while also respecting consumer privacy. Brands can protect identity with tools such as Unified ID 2.0, an open-source framework for replacing tracking cookies.
Brands “are looking for scaled audiences,” Argyilan said, “and then you have a partner like The Trade Desk who has this beautiful ID graph that they’ve built, that allows us to be able to integrate into their programs really easily.”
