Diving overview:
- Albertsons’ retail media division announced Tuesday that it will integrate sponsored product placement into the grocery company’s artificial intelligence-powered conversational search tools.
- Powered by commerce intelligence platform Criteo, this new feature allows brands to influence how shoppers plan meals, search for products, and build their baskets.
- The announcement comes as the rapid evolution and continued adoption of AI in the grocery industry provides retailers and consumer goods manufacturers with new advertising capabilities.
Dive Insight:
As shoppers continue to use AI to streamline their grocery shopping and planning, Albertsons Media Collective is bringing this capability further into the company. This latest integration also brings brands and shoppers closer together at points of high purchase intent.
Albertsons said the expanded partnership with Criteo will modernize its existing conversational search capabilities. Now, select sponsored products will appear within the Albertsons search product carousel related to shoppers’ search queries, according to a press release.
“This integration is designed to create retail media that supports the customer’s shopping journey and displays it in a way that is informative and additive to the customer experience, while providing advertisers with new avenues to engage closer to the moment of purchase,” Jill Pavlovic, senior vice president of digital customer experience at Albertsons, said in a statement.
This isn’t the first time Albertsons Media Collective has turned to third-party partnerships to strengthen its in-house retail media operations. The company has used Collective TV, Rokt, and Capgemini in the past, and in early 2023 worked with Criteo to improve access to demand-side and supply-side advertising capabilities to drive measurable commerce outcomes.
Last week, Albertsons Media Collective announced that it began offering branded entertainment that leverages first-party data and can be distributed through a grocery store media network.
