To ensure the longevity of advertising in an age where our dependence on cookies is lessening, Yahoo Advertising has joined forces with Kroger Precision Marketing (KPM), the retail media business by 84.51°. The collaboration will allow Kroger’s private label merchandise, announced by Yahoo DSP (Demand-Side Platform) advertisers, to benefit from the data from the retailers’ vast purchase-based audience directly within the platform, hence opening a range of possibilities for improved funnel targeting as well as campaign measurement.
The advertising industry is coming to face with the browser phase-out of third-party cookies that is planned for early 2025 that already stimulates the interest in first-party, data-aware advertising. This collaboration fills that gap through Yahoo ConnectID, the company’s data solution, which is designed to make data from Kroger’s retail available to advertisers.
Elizabeth Herbst-Brady, Chief Revenue Officer at Yahoo, emphasized the significance of this move, stating, “Using first-party data is crucial to future-proof against third-party cookie deprecation, and applying Kroger’s retail data will help to ensure addressability for our advertisers.” She further highlighted Yahoo’s commitment to privacy-safe approaches and interoperability, allowing advertisers to activate high-quality data across campaigns through the Yahoo DSP.
Purchase-based audiences from retailers like Kroger are creating new opportunities for brands to understand which audience segments will drive incremental growth. On the measurement front, advertisers can leverage the KPM platform to attribute in-store sales to media exposures from the Yahoo DSP, providing invaluable insights into campaign effectiveness.
Cara Pratt, Senior Vice President of Kroger Precision Marketing, underscored the potential impact of this collaboration, noting, “Advertisers on average see 6.5x higher return-on-ad-spend when using our precision audiences. By expanding our availability through the Yahoo DSP, we’re delivering even more meaningful messages and measurable brand impact.”
The partnership between Kroger and Yahoo Advertising exemplifies the industry’s ongoing efforts to solve for the challenges posed by cookie deprecation. Yahoo ConnectID, part of Yahoo Identity Solutions, reaches 205 million authenticated users in the United States through consented consumer relationships and partners. This identity suite enables advertisers to future-proof their business through the Yahoo DSP and maintain control and return on investment in an identity-constrained world. To date, 48,000 publisher domains have adopted Yahoo Identity Solutions.
While the advertising terrain is changing, the use of a first-party data from trustworthy sources will likely grow more relevant. The integration of Kroger’s audience purchase data into Yahoo DSP will give advertisers the opportunity to highly target and evaluate with this powerful tool. The goal of this partnership is not only to tackle the immediate cookie deprecation issues but also to create a strong base for the efficient and effective advertisement based on data in the coming years.
For brands looking into the future without cookies, the alliance between Kroger and Yahoo Advertising would offer an exciting undertaking to grasp the power of the first-party data, help in better performance to campaigns realized, and also sustain a competitive height in an environment that is constantly in motion which is the digital space.