Family-owned independent grocery retailer Supabarn has partnered with Brandcrush to take the bookings, management, and analytics of its retail media online.
The partnership follows 18 months in which major supermarkets have seen their retail media sales skyrocket, with a report by Mi3 predicting the total retail media market to grow to at least $1 billion by 2025.
That coincides with an increase in shoppers, and traffic, as a result of COVId-10. Data from Nielsen revealed a 6.1% jump in market share for non-major supermarkets through the first three weeks of March 2020, driven in part by panic buying activity. In August, sales for the food section of IGA rose 3.5%.
Supabarn has become an early adopter of Brandcrush’s white-label retail media technology, to help scale the business’ retail media sales efficiently, by offering self-serve options for agencies wanting to make bookings.
Brandcrush notes that the way many smaller retailers handle retail media bookings — via PDFs and spreadsheets — is much more time consuming, and inefficient than an all-in-one platform.
Supabarn managing director, Theo Koundouris says, “We know that there is an incredible potential for growth in our retail media assets. We had already been doing this to a degree, but without the technology to support it, our growth had been hampered.
“We’re excited to partner with Brandcrush and drive greater ROI for brands who can engage and influence shoppers on their way around stores and on their path to purchase”.
Brandcrush co-founder and CEO, Teresa Aprile tells Retailbiz, “With regards to shopper marketing, marketers inherently know if you get closer to the consumer, you get close to the checkout.
“It makes a lot of sense to be putting your dollars closer to that point of sale. But it’s often been an area of marketing handled so manually, it’s quite difficult to have transparency. We just went: how do we make retail media, these owned media assets as portable as a Google or Facebook ad and provide that transparency all the way through?”
Koundaris adds, “Brandcrush is allowing us to access tools, workflows and systems that help us scale our retail marketing efforts in the same way the majors do. We would never have been able to build this technology ourselves, so this plug-and-play technology is a real gamechanger.”
Brandcrush can validate the effectiveness of advertising by matching the advertising with the point of sale date, helping brands measure which types of retail media they’re advertising in has the greatest effect on sales.
Aprile explains, “At the moment we’ve got a good baseline in terms of activation and attribution, but we’re working very closely with each of our partners to drive in their point of sale data.
“And to provide that measurability to suppliers brands, so that they can see the effectiveness down to the different activation type level. They’d be able to see the direct impact but also the halo impact around their media spend.”
When working with a new retailer, Brandcrush first places all of its existing retail media inventory on the platform, then can offer advice on what else can be added in-store, and work with the retailer to deliver it.
Aprile says, “We start with existing inventory and touchpoints. We identify latent opportunites that exist, not just from a tech perspective, but ensuring they can deliver them.
“There’s a huge amount of latent media that businesses are sitting on, and that’s what our technology is here to help them with.”