you should know about Kroger’s self-service advertising platform

Kroger Precision Marketing, the advertising platform it uses to advertise its products, is now in-house.

The beta version of the new system is in place, but the entire marketing team will be switching over in the fall.

Why do we care? Kroger, the US’s largest supermarket chain with 2,700 stores in 35 states has worked with over 2,000 brands. Marketers who launched campaigns on the old ads platform found it “clunky”, and took too much time, as they had to navigate through multiple systems in order to make a campaign go live. Marketers can now access their data and get their ads online in one place. This allows them to make better decisions quicker.

Search Engine Land reported that “it wasn’t something we did lightly” because Microsoft was a great partner. Dan Mayer is VP of Media Platform at Kroger Precision Marketing, located at 84.51@. This new platform will give [marketers] greater control, and allow them to act more quickly on data and insights – that’s what we are excited about.”

Highlights. This new platform gives marketers the ability to:

• Search-based insights, custom ad groupings and relevant audience targeting are available.
• Create, iterate and activate creative messages on the platform.
• Save and customize multiple templates based on brand or product.
• Optimize the budget, messaging and flighting of all campaign elements.
• Create reports to boost performance based on deterministic retail data, including household penetration, unit lift and sales lift.

Mayer said that although Kroger was excited to launch its new advertising platform, the system would always be “a work in progress.” The team looks forward to receiving feedback from customers.

• The media industry is dynamic, so there’s a lot more to come. Mayer stated that the company wants to keep improving its features and functionality.

Here are some highlights of my recent Q&A session with Mayer to learn more about Kroger’s self-service ad system.

Kroger’s “biggest pain-point”

Marketers were submitting feedback about Kroger’s old platform. They explained that it was too time-consuming for a campaign to go live.

• The creative aspect of it was one of the most painful points.
• “Targeted online ads were a particularly disjointed experience. The campaign started on one location, but you had to leave to create the creative in another location – then come back again.
• “To be honest, the current state of things is a bit clunky.” Multiple systems are required to launch a campaign. We needed to bring this one experience into a single platform.

Take back control

Kroger’s decision to create an internal self-service advertising platform and move away from Microsoft in order for its scientists to provide real-time information, which would give them more control, was a result of addressing the biggest pain point faced by marketers.

• “We would like to believe that we are obsessed with the customer experience, and optimising it.
• “[Going internal] gives us a more direct control of that experience, as it allows us offer our data insights more seamlessly.
• “We own the roadmap now, we decide on priorities and what can be put into production, and when. In the past, we relied on partners to get that stuff on the market.
• With our new platform [marketers] are now able to come directly to us via a single point of entry and remain within the platform. You don’t have to jump around other platforms in order to run campaigns.

Marketers’ verdict so far

Even though the platform is in beta, Kroger already has begun collecting feedback.

• The feedback we have received from marketers has been overwhelmingly positive, as they are relieved that the process is now simpler.
• “Marketers are noticing the ease with which they can set up and activate campaigns.
• They’re excited about the science that we bring to them, and how much faster. We have successfully deployed science in the past, but now it is much faster. Advertisers can reap the benefits of this by seeing an increase in performance.
• We’re excited to get more feedback from our advertisers because this is a work in progress. “I’m looking forward to getting more feedback from advertisers, because this is still a work-in-progress.”

Next Steps

The new Kroger ad platform will not be available to all marketers before the fall. However, the company has already begun to look ahead to the next year.

• We’ll have all the advertisers over by the end the year, and we’ll welcome any feedback that they may have as we enhance the features and functionality.
• Marketers will have the opportunity to provide feedback on the advertising platform.
• We will continue to expand the platform across all of our advertising experiences in our off-site portfolio this year, and next.
• We didn’t report revenue or financial goals, but we expected to continue rapidly growing. “Watch this space!”

The post Kroger’s new self service ad platform: what you need to understand first appeared on Search Engine land.