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As grocers look to strengthen their retail media capabilities, Albertsons has been working over the past few years to establish itself as a leader in the field. Christy Arguilan, senior vice president of Albertsons Media Collective, has been at the forefront of these advancements and has been the driving force behind Albertsons’ most important retail media advancements.
For the past three years, Arguillan has served as SVP of retail media for the grocery store. Moving retail media networks in-house In the second half of 2021, Albertsons Media Collective has focused on growth and innovation, partnering with companies that allow the grocer to test new technologies and capabilities, Arguillan said.
Arguillan said standardization is also a priority for Albertsons, and the grocer's retail media network is working to improve measurement across the industry. In September, the Albertsons Media Collective announced that the Interactive Advertising Alliance had signed a Messaging and Analytics agreement with the company. Envision a standardized framework for retail media grocery store Published last summer.
“As [retail media] “With cookies disappearing from the market, retail media in particular has become a much bigger priority and there's a growing demand for retail media,” Arguilan says, “so the need to standardize and become more engaging as a media sector is really important and something we've been really focused on.”
Arguillan spoke with Grocery Dive about Albertsons Media Collective's retail media priorities and the current state of the industry.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
GROCERY DIVE: How is Albertsons approaching new retail media initiatives and projects?
Headshot of Christy Arguilan, senior vice president of Albertsons Media Collective.
Courtesy of Albertsons Companies
Christy Arguilan: The question we always ask ourselves is, “Who does it serve?” From my perspective, it has to serve our clients. So we decide how best to market what we have. Do we need another platform that users have to click on? Or are advertisers looking for some kind of service or platform that they already use?
We feel like we partner more than we build, but we also have some very specific things that we build ourselves, like our data platform. The whole company runs on the data that we have, so it's just a natural way to run it in-house and build it for our purposes.
Consolidation is becoming important for small and local grocers moving into the retail media space. Is Albertsons doing any consolidation work to better connect its banners?
Not yet, but people ask that question sometimes, considering we already operate between 14 and 20 different brands. We've consolidated all of our brands to give us as much national reach as possible within the number of stores and the number of customers we have.
But there's always discussions about what we call a consortium. If we're thinking about white labeling for a marketplace, we need to do a quick privacy assessment. There may be tools and technologies that we can white label. But when it comes to the data part, it gets very tricky for a lot of good reasons, when you think about how privacy laws work and most importantly, what our customers are asking us to do and what they're allowing us to do.
Where is Albertsons Media Collective currently using AI? What are Albertsons’ plans for the future?
Our primary use of AI today is in what we call “execution,” and it's really exciting to think about how it will impact media planning and buying.
Speaking of the need for digitization and optimization, media planning and buying requires a lot of manual work. And the more optimization cycles you can run, the better you perform. And at some point, humans have to sleep, but machines can't. So the ability to accommodate and drive high volume campaign planning, execution and optimization is a real plus for us.
AI is also a big plus for us when it comes to generating multiple versions of creative assets, because it allows us to optimize not just the media itself, but the creative execution as well, and having multiple versions available means better performance overall, as machines can execute more smoothly than humans.
Something we're still trying to figure out is how AI can help with content, especially as we move into television and connected TV (CTV). Most of the time with video, you're going to get a produced video asset from the brand, but if you want to make it commerce-ready, you need to add more. And I think the real questions are, “Can AI help with simple versioning?” and “How do you set up your creative process so that it can be quickly adapted for commerce use?”
Where does Albertsons stand on in-store retail media?
We are now in the midst of asking, “What is this and how do we use it?”
What's really missing is standardization of in-store retail media. Stores have multiple vendors, each with their own separate advertising platforms, but no easy place to centralize it all. So how do you advertise through ads in the gas station, paper tags on the shelves, digital signage in the deli department, etc.? They're all different suppliers.
The ability to advertise from one place and measure the store as a media channel is incredibly complex, and that's something the whole industry is grappling with right now.
The potential is there, but the ability to do it at scale is still a problem that needs to be solved, and I think that will be solved soon.
What do you think Albertsons Media Collective should pursue in the future?
We're currently operating like a media company, but is that all we should be doing, or are there more opportunities in how we bring audience to market, how we bring measurement to market, and how do we take some of the technology that we've built for retail media and bring it to market?
We're also very excited about retail media because we believe it will enable traditional channels like CTV and linear TV to perform much better than they have in the past. Leveraging your audience and showing that it drives sales is a completely different metric than the traditional TV metric of impressions and impression delivery.
Is there anything suppliers and advertisers are looking for from grocers at the moment that they're not getting?
Top of the funnel. How can we do more to drive brand and awareness? Our measurement is focused on the bottom of the funnel, the last click to drive purchase. But there is an increasing demand to understand how retail media works on the brand side.
There are approaches to this, and one of the things we're working on at Albertsons is integrating who we are as part of the marketing mix modeling that big brands and clients are using today. This will allow us to start to understand the impact of retail media. But to get further up the funnel, I think we need to have the right type of content. Right now, most of our content is in the simplest form of “price and product,” which is not necessarily known as a brand builder.
