Uber Partners With Instacart to Extend Reach of ‘Sponsored Items’

Uber Advertising launched a partnership with Instacart’s Carrot Ads.

Via the collaboration, Uber will use Carrot Ads in the United States to extend the reach of Uber Eats’ Sponsored Items formats to consumer packaged goods (CPG) advertisers, according to a Thursday (April 10) press release.

“The integration aims to provide a broader set of CPG advertisers with access to effective solutions that help them win the digital shelf,” the release said.

Starting this month, CPG advertisers in the U.S. will be able to reach millions of “high-intent” grocery and retail marketplace shoppers on Uber Eats using the Carrot Ads solution, which will provide “increased discoverability of relevant products and brands” to shoppers, per the release.

CPG advertisers will be able to build campaigns using Instacart Ads Manager that automatically extend throughout the Instacart Ads ecosystem, which now includes the Uber Eats grocery and retail marketplace, according to the release.

“By enabling access to Uber Eats Sponsored Items in the U.S. via Instacart’s Carrot Ads solution, we believe we can better meet the needs of more CPG brands, especially those making network buys,” said Travis Colvin, general manager for grocery and retail at Uber Advertising. “Our advertising team already works with many of the world’s largest brands directly, but we want to be there for brands of all sizes to help them easily reach our engaged audience in a way that suits them. For the U.S. market, we believe this integration best achieves that goal.”

The partnership comes as brands try to reach an audience that might be much more cautious about their spending. Data released Thursday showed price increases in the “food at home,” or grocery, category. That uptick was primarily fueled by a 5.9% increase in egg prices and a 1.3% rise for meats, poultry, fish and eggs from February to March.

Consumers were retrenching even before the latest round of White House tariffs upset the world economy.

As PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote in a column this week, nearly 78% of consumers across “all major retail categories of spend — clothes, food, health and beauty, personal services, household and tech/digital services — are rethinking what they buy and how much they are willing to spend when they do. Tech purchases, eating out and buying coffee at the local coffee shop are consistently on the chopping block, even for those who do not feel financial pressures.”