Increasingly, retailers are setting up Retail Media, platforms through which they sell advertisements to brand manufacturers that target shoppers at or near the point of purchase. In itself, that’s now new, but the form of advertising, the personalization and the way companies can now measure the effect of it has evolved enormously.
Digitalization gained momentum during Covid, supermarkets were quick to build out their websites and apps and work on solutions to stay in touch with their customers. Since then, they have been able to collect more and more data from their customers, amongst others, through loyalty card programmes, self-scanning, in-app behaviour and online ordering.
At the same time, third-party cookies are being phased out. As a consequence, the value of the first-party data that the supermarket has of its customers has increased significantly. Selling this data, encrypted so that it cannot be traced to individual shoppers, to manufacturers is becoming a very interesting additional revenue stream, very welcome in times of slim retail margins and economic uncertainties.