A Call For Brand Action On Racial Inequality; Roku Ties Up With Kroger

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.

A Global Effort

The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) is partnering with the United Nations (UN) to establish measures that will help brands tackle diversity issues. The UN is urging brands to measure and publicize information about their progress and ability to sustain diversity efforts in their organizations and advertising so that they can be held accountable for their promises, The Drum reports. “It is only through holding ourselves accountable that we will see sustainable change,” said Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, under-secretary-general of the UN and executive director of UN Women. “We must see our aspirations embodied in a new wave of advertisements that use your market power to highlight the situation, and that are true to our hopes, individually and collectively.” WFA CEO Stephan Loerke added that brands have a “once-in-a-generation moment to confront racial intolerance.”

CPG OTT KPI

Roku partnered with Kroger Precision Marketing (KPM), the grocery chain’s data-driven ad unit, to integrate its shopper data with Roku’s household targeting. “We’re looking to move beyond traditional awareness metrics – impressions, reach, frequency,” KPM product strategy VP Cara Pratt tells Adweek. For OTT and advanced TV buys, metrics such as in-store sales lift are slowly replacing traditional TV ratings. “It’s incredibly important for CPG advertisers as they’ll continue to need to shift money out of linear and into streaming to find consumers that have cut the cord,” said Alison Levin, Roku’s VP of ad sales and strategy. “But then there’s also an additional ability for them to make those dollars work harder and to measure those dollars in a way they could not before with their linear buys.”

The Cart Before The Horse

Since March, Instacart has rocketed past Walmart as the largest ecommerce grocery supplier in the United States. Instacart jumped from about 28% market share to more than half, while Walmart fell from almost 50% to a quarter of the market, The Information reports. But those numbers don’t tell the whole story. Walmart’s ecommerce grocery sales soared during lockdown, but as every other grocer added online shopping and delivery, Instacart picked up that market share. Instacart’s network model is an advantage too, since it sources items from across many chains, whereas Walmart shoppers have only what’s in stock at a nearby store. Despite ceding grocery delivery market share to Instacart, Walmart still outperformed every other online marketplace, including eBay and Amazon, in terms of ecommerce growth, according to Marketplace Pulse.

But Wait, There’s More!