We Want Your TV Ad to Ring Up at the Checkout: Christine Foster of Kroger Precision Marketing
CANNES, France – For years, marketers have treated brand building and sales activation like divorced parents awkwardly sharing custody of the media budget. Christine Foster, group vice president of Kroger Precision Marketing, says it’s time for family counseling.
Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Foster argued that advances in retail media measurement are dissolving the old boundaries between awareness campaigns and sales performance. Instead of asking whether a campaign belongs at the top or bottom of the funnel, marketers can now follow shoppers throughout their buying journey and see what actually lands in the grocery cart.
“SKU-level reporting is such an important next step in how we think about video overall,” Foster said. “Historically, video has been great for awareness but really hard to tie to retail impact or retail sales.” She added that connecting product-level sales directly to video campaigns creates “a brave new world for us, which is super exciting.”
Stop arguing about the funnel
Foster said omnichannel activation is helping marketers stitch together campaigns that once operated as separate disciplines.
“You know, these don’t have to be opposing forces,” she said. “These are actually individual tactics that should string together in a way that drives the ultimate performance.”
Rather than thinking in terms of upper, middle and lower funnel strategies, she said brands should focus on reaching shoppers wherever they happen to be.
“It isn’t just about upper funnel or mid funnel or lower funnel anymore,” Foster said. “It’s about really finding the consumer wherever they are in their journey and driving the greatest impact for that specific touchpoint.”
In other words, the funnel may not be dead. It’s simply getting a much better GPS.
Loyalty cards become marketing detectives
The backbone of Kroger Precision Marketing’s measurement strategy is purchase data tied to its loyalty program.
“95% of our sales are connected to a loyalty card,” Foster said.
That gives brands a verified view of what consumers actually buy after seeing advertising across streaming, display and other channels.
“That data is verified, and it tells us a lot about human behavior,” Foster said. “We have loyalty purchase signals that are really going to help measure true impact across the entire funnel.”
For marketers who’ve spent years squinting at attribution models like they were blurry security camera footage, verified purchase data offers a welcome reality check.
Insights that don’t gather dust
Foster also highlighted Stratum, Kroger Precision Marketing’s insights platform, which combines purchase data with activation tools.
The goal, she said, is to eliminate the familiar corporate ritual where fascinating consumer insights are admired in PowerPoint and then quietly forgotten.
“The purchase-based signals that we have really allow a brand to take insights all the way through to activation,” Foster said. “That’s a connectivity that we’ve really not had in this industry previously.”
She said brands can use the platform to translate sales data into business decisions and then carry those decisions directly into marketing execution.
“We’re really at a time and place that we’ve never been before,” Foster said. “It’s an opportunity for brands to really truly take an insight all the way through to activation.”
The cash register gets the final vote
Asked what all this means for campaign performance, Foster returned to a familiar theme: outcomes matter more than media labels.
“At the end of the day, it comes down to outcomes,” she said.
With SKU-level reporting and a unified view of campaign performance, brands can monitor results across channels and adjust campaigns while they’re still running instead of waiting for a postmortem.
“Brands are able to really follow performance throughout the entire channel ecosystem and drive it together to make optimizations in real time that have a better performance outcome,” Foster said.
It’s not quite the end of the age-old debate between branding and performance marketing. But if Foster gets her way, both sides may soon discover they’ve been shopping in the same aisle all along.
For KPM and Roku, Brand Storytelling Is the New Checkout Aisle
You’re watching Beet.TV coverage from Cannes Lion 2026. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
CANNES, France – For years, marketers have treated brand building and sales activation like divorced parents awkwardly sharing custody of the media budget. Christine Foster, group vice president of Kroger Precision Marketing, says it’s time for family counseling.
Speaking with Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Foster argued that advances in retail media measurement are dissolving the old boundaries between awareness campaigns and sales performance. Instead of asking whether a campaign belongs at the top or bottom of the funnel, marketers can now follow shoppers throughout their buying journey and see what actually lands in the grocery cart.
“SKU-level reporting is such an important next step in how we think about video overall,” Foster said. “Historically, video has been great for awareness but really hard to tie to retail impact or retail sales.” She added that connecting product-level sales directly to video campaigns creates “a brave new world for us, which is super exciting.”
Stop arguing about the funnel
Foster said omnichannel activation is helping marketers stitch together campaigns that once operated as separate disciplines.
“You know, these don’t have to be opposing forces,” she said. “These are actually individual tactics that should string together in a way that drives the ultimate performance.”
Rather than thinking in terms of upper, middle and lower funnel strategies, she said brands should focus on reaching shoppers wherever they happen to be.
“It isn’t just about upper funnel or mid funnel or lower funnel anymore,” Foster said. “It’s about really finding the consumer wherever they are in their journey and driving the greatest impact for that specific touchpoint.”
In other words, the funnel may not be dead. It’s simply getting a much better GPS.
Loyalty cards become marketing detectives
The backbone of Kroger Precision Marketing’s measurement strategy is purchase data tied to its loyalty program.
“95% of our sales are connected to a loyalty card,” Foster said.
That gives brands a verified view of what consumers actually buy after seeing advertising across streaming, display and other channels.
“That data is verified, and it tells us a lot about human behavior,” Foster said. “We have loyalty purchase signals that are really going to help measure true impact across the entire funnel.”
For marketers who’ve spent years squinting at attribution models like they were blurry security camera footage, verified purchase data offers a welcome reality check.
Insights that don’t gather dust
Foster also highlighted Stratum, Kroger Precision Marketing’s insights platform, which combines purchase data with activation tools.
The goal, she said, is to eliminate the familiar corporate ritual where fascinating consumer insights are admired in PowerPoint and then quietly forgotten.
“The purchase-based signals that we have really allow a brand to take insights all the way through to activation,” Foster said. “That’s a connectivity that we’ve really not had in this industry previously.”
She said brands can use the platform to translate sales data into business decisions and then carry those decisions directly into marketing execution.
“We’re really at a time and place that we’ve never been before,” Foster said. “It’s an opportunity for brands to really truly take an insight all the way through to activation.”
The cash register gets the final vote
Asked what all this means for campaign performance, Foster returned to a familiar theme: outcomes matter more than media labels.
“At the end of the day, it comes down to outcomes,” she said.
With SKU-level reporting and a unified view of campaign performance, brands can monitor results across channels and adjust campaigns while they’re still running instead of waiting for a postmortem.
“Brands are able to really follow performance throughout the entire channel ecosystem and drive it together to make optimizations in real time that have a better performance outcome,” Foster said.
It’s not quite the end of the age-old debate between branding and performance marketing. But if Foster gets her way, both sides may soon discover they’ve been shopping in the same aisle all along.
For KPM and Roku, Brand Storytelling Is the New Checkout Aisle
You’re watching Beet.TV coverage from Cannes Lion 2026. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
