Instacart CMO Laura Jones on the final frontier of the delivery service's retail media ambitions
From starting as a buzzy grocery delivery service to becoming an essential fixture of pandemic life, Instacart has matured into an established player in the U.S. retail space, with over 7 million monthly active orders and 1,400 retailers on its platform.
The company now has its sights set firmly on the red-hot retail media landscape, offering advertisers access to anonymized, aggregated shopper insights and innovative ad formats like shoppable video and display ads. Case in point: This year’s NFL playoffs campaign with AB InBev’s Michelob Ultra, which featured shoppable QR codes.
“We [made sure] that for every time they were out there with a brand message, there was a clear path to conversion for that consumer,” says Laura Jones, Instacart’s chief marketing officer. “What is so exciting about that is to […] go from watching an ad to being able to have that product delivered in as fast as 30 minutes.”
Jones sees this kind of co-marketing as the final frontier, by enabling advertisers to “make their existing multichannel campaigns shoppable, regardless of what channel they’re occurring on.”
Elsewhere, Jones shares the strategy behind the company’s tie-ups with Peacock and Roku, how she’s reaching shoppers by framing them as the COOs of their households, and the surprising product that cat- and dog-food shoppers are more likely to buy on Instacart.