• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 10, 2020

Kroger Precision Marketing (KPM), the Kroger Co.’s media advertising arm, added a way to prove performance of advanced TV buys on Roku and addressable TV through AT&T's Xandr, which launched earlier this week. The agency will report on the results and tie the advertising views directly to in-store purchases.

Through the new service, consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands can activate Kroger’s purchase-based targeting on advanced TV platforms and then measure advertising exposure back to sales at Kroger.

In the programmatic media space, the loyalty card connects to an audience and to an individual’s buying behavior. “It makes the connection between ad exposure and purchase,” said Cara Pratt, vice president of commercial and product strategy, KPM at 84.51°.  

With nearly 40% of U.S. market share, Roku continues to dominate the space. 

The move turns TV, which has been an awareness channel, into a performance marketing channel. It has not been a lower-funnel channel, and now with addressability, there is a higher expectation, Pratt said.

Consumers spend more time at home these days. The large audience combined with targeting capabilities gives CPG marketers the opportunity to improve the efficiency of their TV advertising investment.

Brands will receive custom reporting to measure media effectiveness beyond awareness metrics.

Reporting can reveal purchase insights such as consumption patterns and the share of category they own. It also will report on household penetration, as well as attributable and incremental sales.

“Marketers will have the ability to understand the impact for their brands and under the backdrop of their category of brands,” Pratt said.

Privacy commitments are fundamental to the way these three companies do business, including opting out of relevant advertising and setting privacy preferences. In the case of addressable, custom list matches are leveraged to connect third-party data sets -- for example, with Kroger and other partners, or with Xandr’s viewership insights from AT&T.

The data is matched by an authorized third-party data safe haven such as Epsilon, Experian, and others in a privacy-compliant manner, so customer information is never exposed.

Only codes are used to activate set-top boxes to enable reception of the targeted ad, to perform the match at a household level and opt-out lists are already augmented. This is industry standard for audience-based advertising.

This is the first time that Kroger will give any brand advertising on Roku or Xandr will receive closed-loop sales measurement directly.