The Trade Desk is adding a new retail tool to its data marketplace toolkit – or a new element to its periodic table, if you will.
The DSP on Tuesday announced new account features with Instacart in the US and Ocado elsewhere around the world. Those online grocery platforms’ product catalogues will be placed directly within an advertiser’s account seat on TTD.
What does that mean?
TTD has lots of retailer sales data partnerships, including Instacart since 2023. These two new integrations will be the first time SKU-level sales and customer data will be available to TTD’s self-service advertisers, at least in anything close to the speed of a live campaign, retail data partnerships GM Jeff Daniel told AdExchanger.
And since any advertiser using the product must also be a user of TTD’s conversion API (CAPI), the DSP is able to see data coming back almost in real time, Daniel said.
The self-serve retail guardrails
The convergence between programmatic tech and online retail sales data is always fraught.
In the case of Instacart and Ocado, there are stringent limitations on how the data might be used.
For one thing, it’s not just an open spigot. In order to access Instacart’s data, the TTD advertiser must be approved by Instacart. And what data it can see is doled out by Instacart on a “case by case basis,” Instacart’s VP of product development Ali Miller told AdExchanger. A brand can see the sales of its own product SKUs and create custom audiences related to its brand terms, for instance, but couldn’t directly target another brand or its terms.
That kind of competitive conquesting is par for the course on Amazon, Google, Apple and Meta. But actual retailers must negotiate a far trickier path around direct conquesting.
An advertiser or agency that works closely with Instacart might come to the team to refine a custom audience or enable some data use case, Miller said. Which again means Instacart itself has the discretion to prevent sharp targeting against brands.
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However, Instacart is generally trying to win on behalf of its advertisers. While an advertiser can’t target an incumbent rival directly, one of the audience segments that can be constructed through the new integrations is known category buyers who haven’t purchased the brand before. Which is essentially conquesting, just without targeting specific competitor brands.
There is a matter of “fair competition” going the other way, Miller noted. Challenger and startup brands need to target people who purchase in their category but don’t know the brand.
For the same reason of veiling its data, Instacart’s closed-loop attribution on TTD is not reported at the user level, Miller said. Advertisers don’t see which specific audiences they targeted using Instacart’s data in a way that can be connected to a third-party ad ID. Instacart reports campaign attribution results in Kokai, TTD’s AI-based ad platform, where the data is all anonymized and aggregated. In that way, it’s akin to how walled garden platforms like Amazon Marketing Cloud or Google’s Ads Data Hub report back on aggregated sales data, but without identity data. And Amazon Marketing Cloud and Ads Data Hub will package custom audiences for your DSP – as long as your DSP is Amazon DSP or Google DV360, respectively.
That this integration occurs within Kokai, where the data provider has more control over what data is provided back to the advertiser, “has made it easy for us to feel comfortable with the types of capabilities that are available,” Miller said.
Early results
The early tests have hit the metrics that retail media advertisers are trying to see.
The soy milk brand Silk, owned by Danone, was a pilot partner. When layering Instacart data into its display campaigns, the advertiser saw new-to-brand customers increase by a third, while its incremental customer count increased by 93%, Miller said.
Daniel said that a different TTD advertiser, an import beer brand, saw 77% of sales converted on Instacart from its campaign were new-to-brand customers.
Although, what do the metrics “incremental new customer” and “new-to-brand customer” even mean? And what’s the difference?
Well, the incremental customer count is determined by the advertiser’s own CRM or customer data spine, which can be a third-party vendor like LiveRamp or TransUnion. If TTD+Instacart convert a sale and that customer isn’t recognized by the advertiser’s own data, it’s incremental. The new-to-brand metric comes from Instacart. If an Instacart customer buys Oreos on Instacart for the first time, that is “new to brand,” even if parent company Mondelez knows this is a maniac who orders cookies directly from the website and has an OREOiD account (a real thing).
The real advantage is the speed, Daniel said. TTD advertisers have SKU-level similar retail data providers, but that data comes into play after the campaign is run. Retailers are juggling how to maximize revenue and meet the market demand for shopper data, he added, while they are still tightly controlling visibility into their own customers.
But Instacart and other retailers are not just pursuing these types of programmatic deals from an opportunistic revenue standpoint, he said. “[They’re] also meeting the demand of advertisers and agencies who just want to move faster with retailers.”
