First-Party Data at Heart of Meta and Dollar General Personalization Pact

As brands, retailers and tech firms look for new ways to target ads to shoppers in a post-cookie world, retail media networks are increasingly filling that gap, with the latest pairing involving Dollar General and Meta.

Dollar General announced Monday (March 27) that it is working with Meta to use the retailer’s opt-in first-party customer data to target ads across the Meta family of apps, including Facebook and Instagram, echoing similar moves made recently by retail giant Walmart, among others.

“Dollar General’s media network, DGMN, has completed testing of a new partnership with Meta,” according to the announcement. “DG is the first retailer to offer this solution, allowing advertisers to reach the hard-to-reach consumer and close the loop with in-store sales. The new partnership enables advertisers to reach DG’s more than 90 million unique customer profiles across the Meta ecosystem via an array of placements including Facebook and Instagram News Feeds, Stories and Reels.”

Measurement of ad performance — and related scrutiny of return on advertising spend — is central to the Dollar General and Meta deal, as it is in other such agreements.

In a Wednesday (March 29) statement to PYMNTS, a Dollar General spokesperson said: “DGMN is the first advertising solution in the market to leverage Meta’s advanced analytics solution successfully to deliver closed loop measurement. Other advertising options currently only utilize soft metrics (like intent to buy and ad recall through engagement like clicks or polling/surveys). DGMN can now help brands understand their true return on ad spend through attribution-based measurement, helping them validate their marketing investments.”

Giving added context to the news, Jen Bryce, head of U.S. retail media at consumer packaged goods (CPG) enterprise Unilever, a DGMN advertising partner, said in the announcement: “We are excited to partner with Dollar General as they expand their product offering and deliver more solutions that help meet the consumer in desirable environments. The first to market, closed-loop measurement on Meta is exciting as we gain more valuable insights and data on our campaign performance.”

Walmart Connect Delivers on Personalization

Ad-tech platform Innovid announced March 21 a pact with the Walmart Connect media network to serve personalized ads across streaming video and connected TV (CTV), leveraging the Walmart DSP (demand-side platform) capabilities of Walmart Connect to personalize and optimize ad content for Walmart customers, while also measuring ad effectiveness.

Showing how advertisers view these developments, Jim Rubio, associate director of precision, at ad agency Spark Foundry said in the Innovid-Walmart Connect announcement: “We’re excited for the continuous development of our well-grounded ad server partner, Innovid, and its connection with Walmart’s first-party data through the Walmart DSP.”

He added that the partnership “will bring us powerful 2P data-driven personalization to advance our audience targeting precision and be able to open new opportunities for us to connect with Walmart consumers in the most effective, relevant way.”

Retail media networks were somewhat of a solution looking for a problem until Google announced it was removing support for third-party tracking cookies in early 2020, saying at the time that “we’re making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products.”

Apple followed suit months later, blocking the use of cookies in its native Safari browser via its Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) feature, then doubled down in 2021 with the release of its iOS 15, iPadOS 15, macOS Monterey, and watchOS 8 with more stringent blocking of the collection of consumer data through its devices.

Enter retail media networks, where shoppers permit retailers to use their data in serving more relevant ads for products and services based on first-party insights into consumers’ searching and buying behavior with a specific retailer.

See also: Retailers Give in-Store Media an Interactive Twist to Boost Basket Size