How Shipt Is Doubling Down on Retail Media

Retail technology provider Shipt is lending a new name, new assets, new features and enhanced analytics to its retail media network. Now dubbed Shipt Media, the service empowers brands to engage members at every stage of building a digital basket, from offsite campaigns to curated and personalized search results, as well as special offers and promotions.

Shipt Chief Growth Officer Katie Stratton told Progressive Grocer at last week’s Groceryshop event that the company has had a robust, successful retail media network since 2018, but that she saw an opportunity to give it a name and a refresh to showcase the company’s ability to bring a holistic view to the table for its partners.

“We’re working already with Unilever, Kraft Heinz and, of course, Target, and thinking about how we can help everybody get closer to the sale and the customer journey,” Stratton explained.

In the past year, Shipt has doubled the number of ad products it offers, and is planning to offer even more enhanced audience targeting, offsite media, display expansion and closed-loop reporting tools in the coming months. Shipt is also committed to reporting transparency and has a vision to leverage all the learnings the company has amassed to help deliver standardized analytics that will help give partners a clear picture of their campaign performance. Shipt is leveraging a strategic partnership with Criteo to do just that.

“Together with Shipt, we’ve developed a solution that allows brands to reach their customers at every touchpoint of a shoppers’ journey,” said Sherry Smith, general manager of global enterprise at Criteo. “As the retail media industry continues to evolve, we look forward to our continued collaboration with the Shipt team to promote reporting and measurement standards that will help brands prove return on ad spend, while also contributing to the maturing of the retail media industry more broadly.”

As for the future of retail media at Shipt, Stratton believes the company is uniquely positioned to get its partners closer to the point of sale, and plans to continue utilizing that strength.

“When we look at the same-day delivery members that we have on Shipt Marketplace compared to some of our biggest retailers and their same-day delivery customers, there is a very minimal overlap today. It’s about 3-5%,” Stratton explained. “There’s this really big opportunity for us to come closer together and bring that other 95-97% through the customer journey.”

Stratton says one of her main goals with retail media at Shipt is to bring the whole marketing funnel into the last-mile delivery space. “Being able to discover, consider and convert same day is really, really important for brands in terms of incrementality for retailers in terms of order volume,” she explained.

Additionally, Shipt is committed to staying focused on transparency as part of the retail media landscape now and moving forward. “We’re having a lot of conversations right now about how we can be more involved in helping move that forward as an industry,” Stratton said.

With offices in Birmingham, Ala., and San Francisco, Shipt is an independently operated, wholly owned subsidiary of Minneapolis-based Target Corp., which is No. 6 on The PG 100, Progressive Grocer’s 2023 list of the top food and consumables retailers in North America, with nearly 2,000 locations. PG also named the company one of its Retailers of the Century.