Kroger Precision Marketing (KPM) has introduced a new suite of off-site capabilities, aiming to help small- to mid-sized brands navigate the complexities of programmatic channels.

• The managed-service team allows brands to brief KPM on campaign objectives while KPM’s experts handle the heavy lifting, activating across fragmented ecosystems like Roku, Paramount, Pandora, and iHeartMedia.

“There’s been so much interest in retail data sets and streaming channels like CTV and audio,” said Brian Spencer, marketing director at KPM. “A brand of just about any size can be successful. The challenge is execution. By scaling our in-house team, we’re enabling smaller brands to finally leverage this opportunity.”

A helping hand: Programmatic audio and CTV are commanding more consumer attention, but execution hurdles remain high.

Buying in these channels was historically a “pain in the ass,” with fragmented identifiers, inconsistent metrics, and long lead times, said Shannon Hartmann, group director of media strategy and activation at KPM.

• KPM’s approach streamlines this by consolidating inventory access and prioritizing unique reach.
• Instead of forcing brands to navigate overlapping audiences across multiple platforms, KPM optimizes for incremental exposure, ensuring campaigns don’t waste impressions on duplicate households.

Keeping it fresh: Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) enables brands to deliver highly relevant, personalized ads.

• By using KPM’s data on purchase behavior, loyalty segments, and contextual signals like weather or location, marketers can refresh creative in real time to meet consumers in key moments.
• For example, DCO can present consumers with contextually relevant cross-category bundles (like “grilling season”) and make it easier for shoppers to discover, add to cart, and check out seamlessly.

“Most brands are really trying to say: How do I serve my bottom-tier shoppers, grow loyalty in my mid-tier, and reward my best customers at scale? With the right signals plus DCO, we can do all of that, without millions in production costs for dozens of creative versions,” said Hartmann.

Best of both worlds: This new managed service sits alongside KPM’s self-service capabilities, enabling an “engage with us how you want” experience, said Hartmann.

“We have a pretty rigorous insights platform. But with how fragmented the industry is, we’re seeing advertisers ask for the ability to bring those insights into their own ecosystems,” she said.

Looking ahead, KPM plans to continue building out its managed and self-service capabilities.

“The goal of the next year and a half [is] creating solutions on both ends of that spectrum,” said Hartmann.

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