Kroger’s Christine Foster sets success upfront for retail media gains

It’s been eight years since Kroger launched Kroger Precision Marketing. Of course, the retail media game has ballooned since then, with companies like Chase, PayPal and United launching their own commerce media networks.

Kroger’s offering, however, continues to lead the charge, with Christine Foster, SVP of commercial strategy and operations, as one of the key executives mapping the company’s course.

Foster spoke with The Current Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Paterik about how precision audiences, incremental reporting and audience-first planning are shaping retail media. Plus, she offers advice for commerce media networks that have entered the space.

You are helping build the next phase of commercial strategy for Kroger. What changes or new initiatives can we expect?

Our goal is really to make precision audiences as easy to work with as possible and build brands, and that should be our ultimate goal.

We recently rolled out incremental reporting with The Trade Desk, which we are super excited about. That helps us isolate the impact of media spend in specific categories, so we know what helped a brand achieve incremental growth, and we can show them based on an understanding of how those categories operate normally.

How are brands partnering with you to the greatest effect?

Well, there are quite a few, and I won’t get into specific brands, but we are seeing a real seismic shift toward audience-first planning. We believe strongly that we can’t rely on legacy frameworks. The frameworks of old are really cemented in demographics. People are so much more than the demographic that you may choose to put them in.

When we partner with these brands, we’re looking for the nuanced understanding of what the consumer is really doing and what kind of buckets they fall into that may not have been the pointed demographic of old. We’re using behavioral data in a way that helps us understand much more specifically what really moves the needle.

And we can help brands do that.

Speaking of data, it can be so valuable and also so overwhelming. How do you cut down on complexity to get results?

For marketers, you have to set upfront success. What does success look like at the very start? If you don’t understand what you were trying to achieve or what good looks like, you’re going to have a lot of trouble defining whether or not you achieved your goal.

Does incremental reporting help brands become more agile? Do you find people making more shifts in real time?

Incremental means something different to everyone, so [we’re]working with our partners to define what success looks like from [their] incremental viewpoint.

Are you looking to move more units? Are you looking to grow household penetration? Are you looking to increase sales? Let us help you target that level of incrementality and tell you what really moved the needle here.

Frozen pizza moves at a different rate than a car. So incremental reporting is, in and of itself, very subjective, but it’s not impossible to set those standards around it.

And we believe that we really do because we’re looking at the natural growth of that product within the category. We can use our own data scientists to help us understand the true impact and the true value of that media dollar.

Kroger was ahead of the curve with retail data. Now we are seeing commerce networks going beyond retailers. What advice do you have for the newcomers entering the space?

The biggest piece of advice is to recognize the difference between monetizing a website and creating a media network. A media network will require investment. It will require data science. It will require an understanding of how to keep customer data private and also utilize it in new ways. And that takes a lot of time and commitment and investment from a retailer or any company, really.

And, so, before hopping into monetization of a website, it’s really good to understand what are we stepping into here and how far do we want to go down that path?

The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc.