By Kevin Dunn, VP of Retail & CPG Sales, LiveRamp
Key Takeaways:
- CPG brands can use retail media networks to access first-party data and overcome historical marketing limitations.
- Brands are moving beyond traditional metrics to focus on incrementality and customer lifetime value.
- Retail media is democratizing data access, enabling more personalized and strategic marketing approaches.
Data is essential for personalized consumer engagement. However, consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands, which traditionally depend on brick-and-mortar retailers to sell products like snacks, beverages, and candy, face challenges in acquiring the same level of consumer data as direct-to-consumer brands. Historically, many CPG companies have lacked direct relationships with consumers, which has meant they’ve also lacked access to store traffic, transaction, loyalty, or e-commerce data. This ongoing data scarcity has made personalization and targeted marketing more complicated, leaving them reliant on broader, less effective strategies.
Recognizing this gap, forward-thinking CPG brands like Mondelēz, PepsiCo, and General Mills are leveraging retail media as a strategic solution. By making the most of first-party data and exploring innovative partnerships to incorporate second- and third-party insights, these companies are unlocking new paths to growth, engagement, and revenue. Their approach provides a shining example and a robust framework for other CPG brands seeking to close the data divide, demonstrating how innovation and strategic collaboration can transform data challenges into opportunities for success.
Access to first-party data through evolved and diversified CPG-retailer relationships
CPG brands benefit significantly from the first-party data that retail partnerships offer. However, since no single retailer offers a comprehensive view of consumer behavior, CPGs must diversify access to data sources across multiple retailers and like-minded companies. By collaborating data with a range of partners, CPG brands gain a more holistic understanding of their target audiences, allowing them to craft more effective, data-driven marketing strategies.
A prime example of this is Mondelēz, which sought to drive category growth and incremental sales for its Triscuit cracker brand while maintaining a privacy-conscious approach to data usage. Leveraging a collaboration enabled by clean room technology, Mondelēz partnered with Pinterest and Albertsons Media Collective and gained the ability to bring together data across all three parties. This unlocked enhanced audience targeting and measurement capabilities, allowing the brand to better understand and engage its consumers. The targeted campaign drove impressive results, including a 16% increase in incremental sales, showcasing how privacy-focused data solutions can achieve measurable impact for brands.
Retail media networks, like Albertsons Media Collective, have also introduced AI-powered self-service platforms that simplify data access and campaign management, enabling CPG brands to independently create and track campaigns in real time. Walmart Connect’s platform, for example, allows brands to select audiences, deploy ads, and monitor effectiveness with minimal data science intervention, making campaign optimization much more accessible. AI tools can further enhance the efficiency of retail media by assisting with audience segmentation and predictive analytics. This automation enables brands to adjust campaigns more frequently — weekly or monthly — based on performance insights. By empowering brands with real-time control, these platforms reduce reliance on intermediaries, allowing for quicker responses to shifting consumer behaviors and better outcomes.
Standardizing data practices for greater effectiveness
One challenge within retail media is the absence of standardized data practices across retailers. This inconsistency complicates brands’ efforts to compare and understand audience behavior across platforms.
Standardizing data remains a challenge today due to the diversity of retail players, but ongoing efforts to align audience insights are paving the way for significant opportunities. By creating greater consistency in how audience data is understood and applied, CPGs can make more informed decisions about where and how to allocate ad spend. For example, if a brand like Hershey’s can differentiate audience segments between Albertsons and Walmart, it can strategically tailor its spending to the retailer offering the most relevant audience. This approach unlocks the potential to connect with more customers in more personalized ways, leveraging the unmatched richness of standardized data insights.
As CPG brands deepen their partnerships with media networks for these insights, their relationships with retailers are also transforming. Traditional in-store marketing tools, like shelf positioning, are giving way to more data-driven approaches. Increasingly, CPG brands base spending decisions on a retailer’s audience insights rather than physical shelf space, reflecting a broader shift toward data-centric digital strategies. The success of Mondelēz’s Triscuit campaign with a clean room exemplifies how brands can collaborate their data with partners to reach new customers and optimize campaigns with more accurate audience data.
Expansion beyond traditional retailers
Looking beyond traditional grocery retailers to non-traditional spaces like convenience stores adds another layer of unique consumer insights available to CPGs. These outlets capture distinct behaviors, for example, impulsive, need-based purchases like snacks or drinks, which may not be evident in big-box retail environments. By diversifying partnerships to include grocery stores, big-box retailers, and convenience outlets, CPG brands gain a broader and more nuanced understanding of consumer buying contexts. This diversity ultimately allows them to develop more targeted marketing strategies and improve product placement decisions.
Building on this insight, CPGs can benefit from exploring non-endemic partnerships, but they must do so in a way that aligns with their brand experience. For instance, Roundel, which prioritizes a seamless guest experience, would need to carefully integrate non-endemic advertisers without disrupting the overall consumer journey. By choosing partnerships that complement their brand values and audience expectations, CPGs can unlock valuable insights from industries outside their traditional scope — such as entertainment or lifestyle — while maintaining a relevant and cohesive customer experience. This approach not only enriches customer understanding but also expands advertising opportunities in a thoughtful and impactful way.
Moving beyond ROAS to incrementality
When it comes to meaningful metrics, traditional return on ad spend (ROAS) is becoming less important. Brands now prioritize incrementality — determining whether a campaign has genuinely generated new consumers or simply redirected existing customers. By focusing on incrementality, CPG brands can better evaluate the effectiveness of their retail media investments, ensuring their campaigns foster true growth by reaching new customers instead of just shifting loyalty among retailers.
For example, if a consumer is persuaded to buy cereal at Kroger instead of Target, incrementality helps the CPG determine if the campaign resulted in an actual increase in sales or influenced the shopper’s choice of retailer. By focusing on incrementality, CPGs can better gauge the success of their retail media efforts, ensuring that investments result in accurate and measurable growth.
Retail media also helps CPG brands unlock new revenue streams through seasonal targeting and customer lifetime value (CLV) tracking. Previously, a brand might only capture one seasonal sale without tracking repeat purchases or seasonal re-engagements. Now, brands can monitor if consumers return to buy their products each season or for specific occasions, allowing them to build profiles based on CLV rather than single transactions.
Another key concept is householding — tracking purchases at the family level over time — to better target products according to life stages. For instance, a family with young children may consistently purchase snacks that evolve with their children’s age, providing a brand with the opportunity to build lifetime consumer loyalty.
This approach not only strengthens brand-consumer relationships but also fosters brand loyalty over time by ensuring targeted, relevant offers that align with customer needs at each stage of their journey. By focusing on CLV and incremental engagement, CPG brands can create lasting connections that drive sustained revenue growth, rather than relying on short-term transactional gains.
Retail media as a long-term strategy
Retail media has become a strategic necessity for CPG brands, providing a valuable avenue for accessing first-party data without requiring a direct-to-consumer model. While some CPGs may explore D2C channels, the majority of consumer engagement will continue to occur within retail environments.
This increasing accessibility to valuable data is driving further investment in retail media, particularly as self-service platforms democratize participation. Smaller brands now have the tools to access and leverage retail data, which was once primarily available to larger players. With innovations in AI and real-time campaign optimization, these platforms are making it easier for CPG brands of all sizes to tailor their messaging, reach relevant audiences, and track performance more effectively.
Ultimately, retail media has proven its worth as a long-term strategic pillar. By embracing data collaboration, CPGs can unlock the full potential of retail media networks, by bringing data together across partners to unlock powerful new insights, enabling smarter, data-informed decision-making. This collaborative approach fosters sustained growth by driving deeper consumer engagement and loyalty. As retail media networks evolve, leveraging these insights will continue to be a key driver of success in an increasingly digital and data-driven market.
Kevin Dunn is the Vice President of Industry Sales, Retail & CPG at LiveRamp (NYSE: RAMP). Kevin has worked in the martech and adtech industry for over 15 years. Prior to LiveRamp, he led the digital transformation of Acxiom’s marketing services business, with innovative partnerships that connected online and offline marketing. Before Acxiom, Kevin spent seven years at IBM where he was a founding member of an industry-changing product called Universal Behavior Exchange. He is a graduate of the University of New Hampshire and holds a masters of science from Northeastern University. He currently resides in the Boston area.
