At CES this year, NBCUniversal announced a new partnership with Instacart that allows brands to use Instacart data to plan audiences for NBCU campaigns. NBCU and Instacart tested this capability in a closed beta with consumer-packaged goods (CPG) brands on Peacock late last year before making it openly available in January. The offering will include linear NBCU supply this year.
“We continue to see traditional demo-based [ad] buying on linear television,” said Alison Levin, NBCU’s president of advertising and partnerships, “and we’ve been working with our advertisers to help them see the value in looking at more precise data.”
For TV publishers, partnerships with retail media networks (RMNs) in particular have been a popular tactic to incorporate actual purchase data into campaign planning so brands can reach people who are most likely to buy their products.
Now, brands can use shopper data from Instacart to improve their campaign effectiveness on NBCU, said Ali Miller, VP of product management at Instacart. And so far, Miller said, the results are promising.
CPG brands that participated in the beta test saw between eight and 17 times their return on ad spend. Roughly 37% of shoppers on average were first-time customers of the brands they purchased.
The campaign results are in
The closed beta test included eight CPG campaigns in the second half of last year, including campaigns for Jif Peanut Butter and Woodford Reserve, a whiskey brand. As part of the pilot, brands matched their own and NBCU’s first-party data to Instacart’s shopper data via a clean room to create custom audiences.
An advertiser, for example, could target an NBCU campaign to audiences with high purchase intent for a particular product. They could also target new customers who have never bought from a brand or lapsed customers who haven’t bought from a brand in some time.
Jif Peanut Butter reported seeing 15 times its return on ad spend (ROAS) during the beta period, with 30% of sales coming from customers new to the brand. As for the whiskey brand Woodford Reserve, it saw 68% ROAS with 27% of sales coming from new customers.
Add attribution to cart
Speaking of results, measurement and attribution are just as important as ad targeting for brands that want to make their TV ad buys more precise.
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“Advertisers have known for quite some time that television moves products off the shelves,” Levin said. But attribution has been historically messy and unreliable on TV because there’s less signal involved. People don’t click around and shop on their TV sets the way they do on their laptops or mobile phones, which is why it’s “historically very difficult to attribute actual purchasing behavior [to TV ads],” she said.
But with a more complete view of shopper data across retailers, marketers can get a sense of whether or not their ads are actually influencing sales. Instacart has roughly 1,500 individual retailers on its platform, according to Miller, so it can give brands a better idea of its sales across both regional retailers and walled gardens like Walmart or Target.
Plus, more retail media spend is moving off platform onto CTV, Miller added, which is why Instacart heavily prioritizes incrementality testing to “drive behaviors that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.” As of last year, Instacart pins its average sales lift for sponsored product ads on the app at 15% based on sales comparisons among consumers who did and did not see a particular ad.
Ultimately, Miller said, better TV ad measurement means more dollars entering the streaming media stratosphere.
