Criteo took a step further into retail media – all the way into physical stores.
On Tuesday, Criteo acquired Brandcrush, a small Australian ad startup that manages physical retail campaigns, including in-store signage, coupon circulars, free sampling and miscellaneous inventory that surrounds a grocery store, like screens on gas pumps and car-charging stations.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Brandcrush adds about 20 new employees to the Criteo team.
The field of physical retail marketing “is really a green pasture for us,” said Sherry Smith, Criteo’s GM of global enterprise.
Brandcrush was already working on bringing offline shopper marketing budgets into the digital age, she said. Brands will now have a single sign-on where they can manage and analyze online campaigns with Criteo and in-store activations via Brandcrush.
Criteo and Brandcrush have already done some co-pitching together, Smith told AdExchanger.
Although marketing free samples and in-store cardboard displays aren’t purchased on a CPM basis, she said, these efforts can still be measured in a data-driven way. For example, Brandcrush incorporates stores that do and don’t do marketing as control groups to help attribute incremental new sales.
Increasingly, Criteo is also assigning credit to itself when online advertising leads to more in-store activity for a brand. Although a programmatic campaign and an in-store shopper marketing push can’t be purchased like-for-like, they can be measured together.
“And in-store activations with the brand and retailers continue to evolve,” Smith said.
But back to Smith’s point about Criteo seeing a “green pasture” in physical trade marketing. The opportunity goes beyond free samples and other activations that don’t lend themselves to programmatic buys. There are other placements being introduced in stores that can be sold on a real-time basis and in a reproducible format for online advertising.
In-store television setups, for example, are a retail media opportunity, Smith said. Stores are also cultivating streaming-type radio feeds that advertisers can buy their way into. Those video and audio placements can be a fit for IAB-standard units. And car-charging stations in parking lots are surfaces for digital out-of-home units that are being packaged for retail media and can also be transacted programmatically.
Criteo hasn’t purchased any of that shopper-adjacent media yet. “But,” Smith said, “this certainly gives us the opportunity to expand into that space.”
