Retail media boom forces grocers like Kroger, Albertsons to reorganize
Many of the largest grocers in the U.S. have restructured to bring their advertising and traditional retail businesses closer together.
In a move announced this summer, Kroger pulled its consumer insights (84.51°), loyalty marketing and retail media (Kroger Precision Marketing) businesses together under a single division using the 84.51° name. Albertsons overhauled its C-suite in May following the failure of its proposed merger with Kroger. That move brought together its digital experiences, marketing and loyalty functions as well as its advertising business, Albertsons Media Collective, under chief commercial officer Jennifer Saenz.
These are just a couple of examples of how grocers have combined different elements of their business to better communicate or have shared goals in serving advertisers and consumers. According to leaders at Ahold Delhaize, Kroger, Albertsons and more, grocers have realized that certain functions like merchandising and marketing need to work more closely together in order to successfully grow retail media businesses.
“Everyone has the memo, certainly inside our company, that the retail business model has transformed,” Brian Monahan, svp of retail media for Albertsons, told Modern Retail at Groceryshop. “You have to be some form of a hybrid retail-media company to compete, so everybody’s really trying to learn how to do that.”
Similarly, Ahold Delhaize USA brought digital merchandising into its retail media team about a year ago, and more recently brought in its digital marketing team, Bobby Watts, svp of retail media, digital merchandising and marketing for Ahold Delhaize USA, told Modern Retail. The company operates stores under Food Lion, The Giant Company, Giant Food, Hannaford and Stop & Shop.
“The old days of having just a chief marketing officer, then having a chief commercial officer — or even a merchant team and a marketing team, and then having retail media as this side project — in a retail organization, that’s not going to work in the future,” Watts said. “You’re going to have to build a customer engagement team that looks at it holistically, and you’ve got to have merchandising play a role inside of that. You’ve got to have brand marketing play a role in retail media.”
Watts said this is because if ads link to product pages that are incorrect or have images that are out of date, for example, that can have a negative impact on the ad’s performance. “What you need is the ad driving to a great experience on the app or the website, and then that creates an opportunity for consumers to buy product and convert, ultimately with ease and without friction,” he said.
Christine Foster, svp of Kroger Precision Marketing powered by 84.51° (the new name for the retail media business under the new division), said that before the reorganization, all the different teams would be talking to the same brands with different goals in mind.
“If the insights team was working with the brand against a certain kind of analysis or viewability into how their business is doing at Kroger, and then we in the retail media side were working with them on an activation that had nothing to do with that analysis, that then was a competing priority internally,” Foster said. “Bringing everyone together and saying, ‘What do you see?’ and learning a common language has been transformational, in terms of the impact and value we are already [providing] CPGs by having more strategic conversations.”
Albertsons’ Monahan came to the company in July from Dentsu International, where he led the firm’s global retail media strategy. He was also vp of marketing for Walmart’s e-commerce website from 2013-2016, according to his LinkedIn profile. The biggest change he’s noticed from building Walmart’s retail media business a decade ago to leading Albertsons Media Collective, he said, has been how retail media has evolved into a key function of grocery businesses. Merchants, he added, are now interested in supporting the growth of the media business.
“What I experienced a decade ago at Walmart … was like the host was rejecting the transplanted organ as you’re trying to build a media business inside a retail business,” Monahan said. At Albertsons, with the new management, he said “the executives are very clear that media needs to be a key pillar of our strategic growth.”
Still, he said the retail business is what powers the company’s flywheel.
“We really see our mission as driving collective growth,” Monahan said. “We want to drive trips and basket size, and we want to help our advertising partners also get new-to-category customers and high-lifetime-value customers. And we want our end shopper to discover new stuff they’re going to like, so they’re a customer for life.”
Pennsylvania-based grocer Giant Eagle also brought its merchandising team together with its marketing, strategy, e-commerce and retail media teams in July. They are now under the leadership of chief merchandising and marketing officer Justin Weinstein, who was previously the company’s chief strategy and marketing officer.
“It’s really about aligning incentives and aligning outcomes,” Weinstein said in an interview. “Decisions we make in e-commerce impact retail media, and decisions we make in retail media impact e-commerce. … The same is true of merchandising and marketing. Those are two functions that need to serve the customer. You can’t have one message over here and merchandising strategy over here, and the two things aren’t connected.”
Scott Langdoc, global head of grocery, chain drug and convenience retail at Amazon Web Services, has seen grocers reshape their corporate and brand strategies as a technology partner. This has included the birth of more chief data officers within these organizations.
“Retailers are breaking apart traditional leadership roles,” Langdoc said. “They’re really getting hyper-focused in these areas that they’re seeing make the most difference and have the most effect on successful execution.”
Those individuals, Langdoc said, have “the responsibility of managing and articulating and distributing that super valuable asset — and not just the data itself, but also the resulting analytics and the resulting insights that that data can drive.”
Additionally, Langdoc said he’s noticed new leaders come in with less technical backgrounds who instead understand the brand strategy and the line of business as a whole.
“They’re saying, ‘We know what the workflows are; we know what the demand requirements are; we know what the brand experience is — so we’ve really got to be thinking about internally and externally. How are we digitally modernizing and taking advantage of that?'” Langdoc said. “It’s not just e-commerce anymore. It’s about the digitalization of the associate’s environment, the customer’s environment, our mobile apps, the web, etcetera.”