The data pact between NBCU and Instacart is set to begin on streaming and later extend to linear.
Packaged-goods advertisers who sell through retailers historically had a disadvantage targeting audiences or getting quick signals back on whether their ads generated sales.
Increasingly, however, retail data for targeting and measuring outcomes is getting more abundant for CPG marketers. A new deal between NBCUniversal and Instacart is the latest example in a growing array of capabilities giving CPG businesses long focused more on brand advertising the means to become performance marketers.
NBCU and Instacart are collaborating by linking their first-party data for targeting advanced audiences and measuring the impact of campaigns on Peacock and other streaming services. They will anonymously match Instacart’s more than 7 million active monthly users who use the service for delivery from 1,500 retailers nationwide with Peacock’s 31 million subscribers.
The effort is expected to begin this quarter on streaming and later extend to linear, leveraging cable box data from NBCU’s corporate sibling Comcast. It expands an initial partnership that began last year, which included Peacock Premium membership for Instacart+ subscribers.
It’s the latest in a growing number of efforts to match CPG household sales data to streaming and linear audience data, including by NBCU starting last year with the Walmart Connect retail media network. And industrywide, the effort to get CPG marketers better data for advanced audience targeting and measuring sales outcomes from ads appears to be gaining momentum.
GroupM announced a deal last month giving clients of its programmatic media buying operations exclusive access through the end of this year to NCSolutions consumer behavior insights for use in AI-enhanced campaign optimization. NCSolutions is a joint venture between Nielsen and Catalina, which draws on retail loyalty card data from the latter.
Marketers can use NCS data to target custom audiences such as heavy category buyers or rival brand buyers, then measure the subsequent sales outcomes for people exposed (or not exposed) to ads.
GroupM’s WPP sibling VML in March announced a collaboration with CommerceIQ to bring data and analytics around digital shelf placement, product availability, reviews, pricing and promotion to bear on retail media and content plans.
Of course, the CPG data race is a competitive one, and the collaboration with CommerceIQ brings VML capabilities similar to what Publicis acquired when it bought Profitero in 2022. The combined Publicis Media and Profitero team won the combined consumer and commerce media agency account of Kimberly-Clark Corp. earlier this year after the company decided to unify what had been separate accounts.
Publicis Groupe’s Epsilon joined with Circana (formerly IRI) to set up a clean room in 2022 to match loyalty card purchase data with marketer first-party data for CTV and programmatic digital targeting and outcomes measurement, similar to what GroupM is doing with NCSolutions.
And other retailers certainly have already delved deeply into CPG sales data for targeting, including Kimberly-Clark, whose U.S. Media Partnership and Investment Lead Jeff Daniels talked at the ANA Media Conference in March about leaning on Kroger Precision Marketing data to target the best audiences for Huggies ads on CTV. Kroger first opened its retail media capabilities for CTV targeting and outcomes measurement in 2022.
In general, with a longtime preference for long-form big-screen video advertising, CPG has had a growing interest in applying retail sales data to CTV in recent years.
One thing Instacart brings to the increasingly competitive CPG data race is visibility across multiple retailers, said Tim Castelli, VP of global advertising sales at Instacart, which delivers goods from retailers ranging from Costco to regional supermarket chains. That gives marketers more visibility into what their consumers are doing beyond a single chain.
“Quick attribution and measurement to understand campaign performance is so incredibly important for this market right now,” said Alison Levin, president of advertising and partnerships for NBCU, noting that CPG marketers long have had to wait on retail data that took weeks to arrive and marketing mix models months to analyze.
For NBCU, the Instacart partnership is one more lever in its effort to increase trading on advanced or strategic audiences.
“The number one goal for us in the upfront is to make our advertisers’ media perform as best it can,” Levin said. “We believe deeply that strategic audiences drive efficiencies and effectiveness, and one important way that CPG advertisers can find strategic audiences is to measure the outcomes as quickly as possible.”
While there’s growing availability of retail data, and advertiser interest in using it from CPG brands, NBCU also has done deals with automakers such as General Motors, where it matched the automaker’s first-party database with NBCU viewing households to find the best matches. Levin pointed to the fact that NBCU also owns Fandango, which creates opportunities for advanced audience matching for film advertisers.
For that matter, Castelli noted that Instacart also handles delivery for Best Buy and Dick’s Sporting Goods, so it has data of value for electronics and sporting goods brands as well. And Instacart also is seeing growing interest from "non-endemic" advertisers, i.e. brands outside CPG, in using CPG data for targeting. That's an interest Walmart Connect is increasingly looking to tap as well.
For example, Brittany Clauss, director of advertising and social media strategy at United Airlines, noted at the ANA Media Conference that United has been targeting ads for potential travel to Spain to people who buy ingredients for making Spanish dishes.
