• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, March 23, 2026

Google has begun working with Kroger Precision Marketing to integrate the retail giant’s first-party shopper data into YouTube and Google’s third-party inventory.

Brands can now use what the companies call Kroger’s "high-intent shopper audiences" across YouTube to reach customers where they already watch on average about 90 million hours of shopping videos daily, according to Google data.

The company will also roll out SKU-level reporting in Display & Video 360 (DV360), part of the Google Marketing Platform (GMP) for programmatic media buying. The goal is to let brands see the exact impact of their YouTube and Display spend on Kroger sales. This is powered by integrations with LiveRamp and MetaRouter, with no additional setup required for brands. 

"DV360 uses Gemini models to power performance and measurement," Bill Reardon, GM of enterprise Google Ads at Google, told reporters during a briefing, adding that Google had made Ads Advisor generally available.   

Reardon also said Google will soon release "Campaign Builder" where marketers can upload a media plan, and the platform will provide a complete campaign strategy.

Campaign optimization and monitoring will track rejected creatives and provide insights to recover strategies to reach optimal spend.

Campaign reporting will set performance markers across line items with one prompt, and automatically create tailored dashboards with custom metrics.

During the Google NewFront Livestream, executives highlighted combining AI, automation, agentic, and combining the technology company's innovations more closely with YouTube.

“When you look at training a Gemini model it is broken up into two core stages,” said Zach Gletcher, Group product Manager Google DeepMind, who has been with the company for nearly 10 years.

During the NewFront Livestream, Gletcher said “in a pre-training stage, you’re taking the world’s information across the internet and capturing it in the model. In a post-training stage, it tunes the model to work with specific use cases.”

It’s about thinking, reasoning, giving the model a train of thought, he said. Models will reason and plan out the steps it will take to follow multiple tasks.

Gletcher works closely with the search team, building Gemini into the products where understanding multimodal for the models becomes very important. It's about allowing Gemini to understand complex scenarios.

Marta Martinez, marketing director of Google Advertising Platforms for the Americas, during her presentation, went as far as comparing the Gemini and AI revolution to industrial revolution and the discovery of electricity because it "unlocked new ways to power the world."