How Walmart, Amazon, Albertsons and Instacart are expanding retail media

Retailers from Albertsons to Walmart to Instacart are taking over CES this year, highlighting not just shopping technology—drones and digitally enhanced carts—but perhaps more importantly, ad tech. This week, Albertsons Media Collective announced an AI-powered retail media partnership with Capgemini, and the grocery delivery app Instacart has a new advertising deal with Google. The developments show how much retail is integrating with media and technology, fueling the growth of digital advertising. Retail media, however, also is a complicated landscape, with many companies developing their own ad tools, giving consumer packaged goods partners too many platforms to manage. At CES, the major retailers and tech players are talking about using AI to automate ad buying and creating more partnerships. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs “Retail media is getting very complex,” said Marla Kaplowitz, president and CEO of ad industry group 4A’s. “Brands are having to go to all these individual providers. So the more a platform enables interconnectivity to data sets, that is going to be really key.” At CES, the large retailers and their connected TV partners, which always have a big presence at the electronics show, will discuss how advertisers move products from commercials to shopping carts, online and in-store. This year Walmart has a big presence at CES, Kaplowitz said. “Walmart is really doubling down,” Kaplowitz said, “emphasizing they’re not just a giant retailer, but also a technology company.” Also read: X receives mixed reception at CES Here are some of the ways retail media will evolve in 2024. Albertsons Media Collective automates with AI Albertsons Media Collective, the grocery chain’s retail media arm, announced on Wednesday a partnership with Capgemini, a strategic consulting firm. The deal gives Albertsons Media Collective a new AI-powered platform to manage retail media campaigns for the brands in its stores. Until now, Albertsons Media Collective had been working with Merkle to provide managed media services to packaged goods brands in its network. Albertsons as a company still has an enterprise relationship with Merkle. Retailers, especially grocery chains, must coordinate with the brands in their stores and on their websites to advertise, and Albertsons Media Collective had been doing most of that work through human relationships and manual ad buys. Albertsons Media Collective brought Capgemini “on board to automate the media planning and buying process,” said Kristi Argyilan, senior VP of retail media, Albertsons Media Collective. The new platform will help Albertsons’ team create ads with generative AI tools, which are becoming more widely available in ad tech, and it will use machine learning to plan campaigns. Through AI, fewer people will need to help in campaign creation and media optimization, and instead the team can focus on analyzing data and other tasks, Argyilan said. “Any client that works with Albertsons Media Collective, their campaigns will run on this platform in a more efficient, effective way,” Argyilan said, “still with humans but with humans doing the high-value work.” On Tuesday, Albertsons Media Collective also announced a marketing technology deal with Criteo, the ad tech platform that offers self-serve tools to advertisers. The deal allows advertisers to use Criteo’s automated platform to target ads to potential Albertsons' shoppers online. Retail media ad spending is expected to rise from $46 billion this year to $109 billion in 2027, according to Insider Intelligence. Albertsons Media Collective is growing “in line” with that trend, Argyilan said. Instacart rolls into ad deals Instacart announced a new ad partnership with Google on Tuesday. The grocery delivery app will use its first-party data to run Google Shopping ads, targeting them to likely customers, according to Fidji Simo, Instacart’s CEO, who spoke with Ad Age ahead of CES. Instacart already has ad deals with The Trade Desk and Roku, where shopper data helps deliver targeted ads. Instacart, which started trading as a public company last year, generated $222 million in ad revenue in the third quarter, which was up 19% year over year. “[Brands] can target based on that Instacart activity, so they can target people who are repeat users of the brand, or people who are new to brand, and target the people on Google,” Simo said, “and the ads lead to Instacart.” “You go from seeing an ad on Google to getting the product delivered to your door in an hour,” Simo said. Also this week, Instacart touted in-store advertising through high-tech grocery carts it called Caper Carts. The carts have digital displays that will run promos for items in stores. Instacart also has been using AI to improve its features, such as generating recipes for people based on the contents of their shopping carts. In-store display advertising is an important component of retail media, Albertsons’ Argyilan said. “What the industry really needs is more of an ad platform for in-store because it’s such a fragmented marketplace,” Argyilan said. Read more: How Instacart is working with The Trade Desk Amazon’s commerce cart overflows Of course, Amazon, the e-commerce and tech giant, is at CES again, and it’s talking about how it united shopping data with video. At the end of January, Amazon will roll out the ad-supported version of Prime Video, which will increase the number of commercials on the connected TV platform. Video is a powerful medium for shopping, and Roku, NBCUniversal, Disney and others have seen the potential of applying viewer data to target ads and boost sales. This year, Amazon even put shopping directly into “Thursday Night Football” games with “interactive video ads,” which lets people put products from commercials into online carts. In November, Amazon also hosted its first Black Friday football game with the NFL, which was a showcase for how Amazon plans to incorporate direct sales into commercial breaks going forward. “We’re in a really differentiated space, especially with Prime Video and premium content,” said Danielle Carney, Amazon’s head of NFL ad sales, “then [we’re] connecting that to the performance and measurement capabilities that exist within retail media and Amazon.” Walmart’s pop-up shop Walmart made its first official appearance at CES this year, showcasing its stores and technology in a 10,000-square-foot installation at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Walmart Connect, the retail media side of the business, also had side events planned at C Space, the tech and media conference within the electronics show. Walmart CEO Doug McMillon held a keynote address on Tuesday, and today Seth Dallaire, Walmart’s chief revenue officer, was set to lead a conversation about retail media and data with representatives from Bimbo and Kimberly-Clark. Walmart has made technological upgrades this year to its website and app. It redesigned its website’s homepage and built augmented reality features into its app to assist shoppers. This month, Walmart also announced a partnership with Unity, the game development platform. Walmart is allowing developers to connect to its commerce API—application programming interface—to enable games to feature brands from its stores. The partnership is a step toward commerce in the metaverse, Walmart announced last week.

How Walmart, Amazon, Albertsons and Instacart are expanding retail media

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