RANCHO PALOS VERDES, CALIF – Retail media networks are evolving beyond their own websites, as platforms increasingly leverage transaction data to target consumers across the open web and connected television.
U.S. commerce media ad spend projected to reach $69.69 billion in 2025, a 21.8% increase over the previous year, according to data from Emarketer.
For Instacart, this means utilizing its digital-only transaction data to inform advertising buys well outside the grocery application, said Dave DeRobbio, Director, API and off-platform data partnerships, Instacart Ads, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
Moving beyond the bottom funnel
DeRobbio noted that while retail media networks remain the “furthest down the funnel,” the industry is witnessing a convergence where transaction data informs broader media consumption.
“I think we have a lot of different opportunities for brands and agencies to reach consumers, not only when they’re at the core and way down into that purchase funnel… but also now to use a lot of those signals that they’re seeing in those channels and reach consumers elsewhere throughout their day,” DeRobbio said.
He emphasized that social channels have become synonymous with “clicking to buy.” “You see things in a scroll and immediately you trust that you can click, and in some instances, double tap on the side of your phone… and all of a sudden whatever it is you bought is showing up at your house,” he said.
Solving the linear TV gap
Historically, television advertising relied on demographic proxies rather than deterministic purchase data, leaving marketers to estimate who actually bought their products. DeRobbio explained that, 10 years ago, purchase data was often siloed at the grocery store or credit card level, creating a disconnect between ad exposure and sales attribution.
“You really never had the ability in linear television to know exactly who it was that you were reaching,” DeRobbio said. “You had an idea, you had an age, you knew what types of folks watched these types of shows and you hope that reaching those consumers, you weren’t wasting too much investment.”
With the rise of streaming, however, advertisers can now connect viewership to specific shopping behaviors.
Utilizing digital-only signals
Instacart’s proposition relies on a dataset derived entirely from digital transactions across 1,800 retailers, providing a national view that differs from regional, brick-and-mortar loyalty card data. This allows for targeting based on online shopping behaviors that are increasingly adopted by younger generations who expect automated convenience.
“We’re digital only, so there’s really no brick and mortar types of signals in the audiences that we provide,” DeRobbio said. “When you’re reaching Instacart consumers, you essentially have 98% coverage of the US. So you have a… purely digital, national, not regional signal.”
To facilitate this, the company has been building out its automated capabilities. In March 2025, Instacart launched AI-powered Universal Campaigns to help advertisers optimize objectives across formats, though DeRobbio noted the broader goal remains understanding the shifting consumer expectation that products simply “show up at my house.”
