Data-driven shopper marketing, it’s bringing people together. And not just ad tech vendors.
Consider a recent campaign collaboration test between Mondelez, the shopping rewards app Fetch and Albertsons Media Collective, the grocer’s retail media business.
“I always said, I think we need to change our title, because it’s not the old school shopper marketing,” said Anne Martin, director of shopper marketing for Mondelez, which owns Oreo, Ritz, and a variety of other snacks.
Retail media expands into CTV
Shopper marketers are in a tough spot nowadays because their media campaigns are broadening beyond the point of sale.
No longer is shopper marketing just in-store placements and coupons, or even just on-site search on a grocery site or app. Retail media is expanding to CTV, new mobile placements and lots of other places where people aren’t necessarily shopping.
Instead of just going to Google or doing a brand campaign to reach audiences across the web, retail media networks are trying to make those off-site or non-shopping placements resonate with shoppers, Martin said. The goal is to make these placements act more like predictable performance media, like when someone is actually on a retailer’s site and thus close to a purchase.
For instance, shopper marketing is moving to CTV, a branding channel that isn’t intuitively about driving a direct, measurable sale, like through a coupon deal.
CTV may not make sense for every brand or shopper marketing campaign, Martin said. But when audience data is layered in by partners like Albertsons and Fetch, CTV can be a far more useful channel for shopper marketing. “There’s a time and place for the expansion of CTV,” she said.
The data collab
But a branding medium can also be a useful shopper marketing channel even without the audience’s awareness.
For instance, one thing Fetch can do with its new Albertsons Media Collective partnership is to customize ads or target shoppers based on a broader view of a person’s shopping habits, said David Parisi, Fetch’s GM of restaurants and retail.
Albertsons has a very strong data set based on what loyalty members and customers purchase at its stores. But Fetch might know if someone has never bought Mondelez crackers before and whether they seem to prefer a different cracker brand. (The cracker segment was the guinea pig for a recent ad personalization test between Fetch and Albertsons).
“Technology that focuses on personalization just continues to get more and more important,” Martin said.
Customize and conquest
Even so, a CTV branding campaign may not work for shopper marketing purposes. Yet certain messages targeted at people known as category shoppers – without loyalty to a specific brand – could make sense regardless of how distant an ad placement is to the point of sale.
For brands, this is both a challenge and an opportunity.
Mondelez can conquest the customer base of its competitors in a more targeted way on a platform like Fetch, where people are making purchase decisions based on deals. Thing is, other brands can also do the same.
For Fetch, this can be an uncomfortable situation. When Fetch converts a conquest customer for Mondelez with Albertsons, it had to poach that shopper from another brand and a different retailer, which are also Fetch partners.
But that’s just how shopper marketing works these days.
“We like to think that a consumer’s attention is up for grabs here,” Parisi said regarding potential blowback from retailers and brands as Fetch’s retail media program turns their customers into another brand’s shopper marketing target.
His advice? “We encourage both CPGs and retailers to show up in a way that they think will elicit the best response.”
