Kroger and the Yahoo DSP Are Transforming How Brands Reach Consumers

July 10, 2024

Consumers expect brand messages to be relevant and timely. But with consumer attention fragmented across the open web, it can be harder than ever for brands to deliver the right message to the right household.

The recent integration between Kroger Precision Marketing (KPM) and the Yahoo DSP opens the door for advertisers to use purchase-based insights in programmatic campaigns. This empowers brands to reach relevant households by applying Kroger's purchase signals directly within the Yahoo DSP.

At the 2024 Path to Purchase Institute Retail Media Summit, Beth Gross, Senior Director of Global Commerce Media at Yahoo, and Nick Hamilton, SVP of Technology at KPM, took the stage to explore how retail signals are reshaping marketers' understanding of consumers.

How marketers can use retail signals to gain insight into audiences

As third-party signals fade, retailers have introduced new first-party signals. This presents a crucial opportunity for brands and agencies to explore purchase data as a more effective means of connecting with their audiences.

Beth Gross

"Brands have their own first-party data giving them in-depth insights about their most loyal audiences. Retailers like Kroger have come along with retail purchase signals, which can tell you more about the category and broader purchase trends," Gross said.

As brands compete in product categories that are more stratified and complex than ever, retail data can help brands understand these changes. “Shopping behaviors reveal nuanced lifestyles, aspirations, and life stages more meaningfully than demographics alone,” Hamilton said. “We are what we buy."

Retailers can help brands get a holistic understanding of what their audiences are purchasing across other categories and what audiences are doing who haven’t tried their brand, he added. “These rich insights can help improve marketing plans and strategies to be much more relevant and engaging for audiences, which leads to better performance."

Through Kroger’s successful long-term loyalty program, KPM can draw on purchase behaviors over time to develop a deeper understanding of shoppers’ needs.

"We have a rich history of sales data that gives us the ability to predict future behavior. This allows us to enable a seamless experience for our audiences both online and in stores," Hamilton said.

Determining the true impact of media exposure

The key to isolating the incremental impact of media exposure is being able to accurately assess what audiences exposed to the media would have done had they not seen the advertising, Hamilton explained. “With roots as a data science organization, Kroger Precision Marketing takes a lot of pride in the accuracy of our closed loop measurement."

KPM employs a sophisticated framework that combines granular multitouch attribution, test/control measurement, and top-down market level integration.

"When we assess larger cross-channel initiatives, we have a methodology called UMA (Unified Measurement Approach) that allows us to tease out the incremental impact for audiences across channels,” Hamilton said. “This approach accurately identifies incremental sales driven by each channel without taking credit for sales that would have occurred organically.”

What’s on the horizon for data science

Looking toward the future, both Gross and Hamilton expressed anticipation about the potential of advanced algorithms in improving how brands engage with consumers.

Nick Hamilton

“The brands we work with are constantly looking for better insights to leverage in their retail partnerships,” Gross said. “We have a lot of resources that can help us predict what consumers want—so we're excited about using that with dynamic creative optimization. It's about that right message to the right shopper at the right time when we're in that shopping mode. All of those pieces are starting to come together.”

Hamilton envisions a seamless insights-to-activation process powered by intelligent systems. "Today, science and technology can generate very rich and actionable insights that enable us to quickly activate and drive brand growth. The next generation will be even easier and faster."

Success means everybody wins

Hamilton underscored the collaborative spirit between Yahoo and KPM—and the shared goal of optimizing the customer journey. "I love the challenge we face in the media industry because we all define success in the same way: a customer makes another purchase. When that happens, a customer lets us know the marketing was relevant—and brands are happy too."

As retail media continues to evolve, the integration of sophisticated data science and smart technology through media collaborations will lead to more meaningful and effective consumer engagements, benefiting brands and audiences alike.