Originally published on Digiday.
Rounding out a series of moves to accelerate its e-commerce efforts and offerings — all of which have been announced at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity — Omnicom has struck a strategic collaboration with Kroger Precision Marketing that will deliver early-adopter opportunities to Omnicom clients.
The agreement, which includes other commercial and strategic benefits, will launch with Kroger Precision Marketing feeding its stock-on-shelf data sets on a daily basis to Omni, Omnicom’s marketing orchestration platform that underpins all Omnicom agencies. It’s essential for Omnicom, since no Kroger data is included in Omnicom’s Supply Chain IQ Score, which helps brands quickly and effectively re-direct media spend to deliver on business KPIs in a supply-strained environment.
The agreement marks the first formal collaboration involving this dataset between the Kroger retail media network and an agency holding company, according to Omnicom executives.
“What that means in terms of value for us is that now we have access to [information] that give us intraday insights in terms of actual shopper behavior,” explained Marc Rossen, Omnicom Media Group’s senior vp of investment and analytics.
Omnicom is also getting market-basket insights, which Rossen described as the ability to understand what consumers are choosing to buy as substitutes when products are out of stock. “That’s another game changer in our ability to understand consumer preferences,” said Rossen. “How we shift dollars from a retail media perspective to know that if a consumer only buys X products, but they will always shift to Y products, then we can know from an optimization perspective that we should shift retail media dollars when X product is out of stock to Y.”
“We believe that there’s an opportunity to really explore that lens for national investment choices as well for media,” said Cara Pratt, senior vp of Kroger Precision Media. Pratt also noted it’s important to “learn together and recognize this is a really important time to make sure that those [retail] media dollars are invested appropriately in driving behavioral change for brands…we’re excited about what we can do together.”
The end goal, according to Megan Pagliuca, OMG’s chief activation officer, is to reduce waste. “We’re going to be using this data to change how we optimize and activate media to reduce waste, and have a better consumer experience,” she said. “If you see an ad for a product that isn’t in stock, it’s not a great use of dollars.”
“There’s no doubt that commerce is the big play for the year and moving into 2023,” said Jay Pattisall, vp and agency analyst at Forrester Research. “These types of deals and activities put together the data infrastructure and the inventory that make them able to get in these retail environments, and to be able to activate on them.”
