Kroger offers advertisers a marketplace for its first-party data

Your purchase in the deli section could be fueling the ads you see on the web.

Kroger on Wednesday announced an advertising tool that lets marketers use its first-party shopper data in their programmatic ad buying.

• The new offering was announced at an Advertising Week New York session on Wednesday, where Kroger’s SVP of precision marketing, Cara Pratt, touted the service’s flexibility and the sales insights it offers.
  
• The Kroger Private Marketplace gives access to shopper data from the grocery chain’s sales and loyalty programs. Marketers can apply that data to the demand-side platform of their choice, meaning they can use it to target people across the web, instead of on Kroger’s websites.

The tool also lets users track metrics like new buyers and sales lift. Onstage, Pratt made the case for retailers’ relevance in the ad business because of their ability to use shopper data to reflect a campaign’s success.

“It isn’t enough for a media publisher to sell impressions. It has to be driving results. Sales results matter,” she said. “Retailers have the ingredients to make brand advertising more effective."

Big retailers like Walmart and Lowe’s have been building out their digital advertising businesses. Kroger is one of the country’s largest supermarket retailers, also operating brands like Harris Teeter and QFC. The company’s data analytics arm, 84.51º, claims to have first-party retail data on nearly half of all US households.—ZS