As grocers look to ramp up retail media capabilities, Albertsons has been working over the past few years to fashion itself as a leader in the space. Kristi Argyilan, Albertsons Media Collective’s senior vice president, has been at the forefront of these advancements and a driving force for some of Albertsons’ most pivotal retail media moves.
Argyilan has served as the retail media arm’s SVP for the past three years and helped the grocer move its retail media network in-house in late 2021. Since then, Albertsons Media Collective has focused on growth and innovation, Argyilan said, partnering with companies that allow the grocer to experiment with new technologies and capabilities.
Standardization has also been a priority for Albertsons, Argyilan said, as the grocer’s retail media network works to improve measurement industry-wide. In September, Albertsons Media Collective announced that the Interactive Advertising Bureau would assume the retail media standardization framework the grocer published last summer.
“As [retail media] has exploded as a priority, especially with cookies coming out of the market, the demands of retail media are escalating as well,” Argyilan said. “And so our need to standardize, to become easier as a media sector to engage with, is a real important piece and one of the things that we’ve been leaning into.”
Argyilan spoke with Grocery Dive on Albertsons Media Collective’s retail media priorities and where the industry stands today.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
GROCERY DIVE: How does Albertsons approach new retail media initiatives and projects?
KRISTI ARGYILAN: The one thing that we always ask of ourselves is, “Who is it in service of?” And, from my perspective, it needs to be in service of the clients. So then we decide the best way to bring what we have to market. Does it require another platform users need to click into? Or are advertisers asking that it be some kind of service or platform they’re already using?
We do find that we partner more than we build, but there are some very specific things that we build ourselves — like our data platforms. Because the whole company operates off of the data that we have, having that be internally run and built for our purposes is naturally the way we do that.
Consolidation is becoming vital for smaller and regional grocers expanding into the retail media space. Is Albertsons doing any consolidation work to better connect banners?
We haven’t yet, but I get asked that question, especially given how we already operate 14 to 20 different brands. And we certainly have consolidated all of those so that we can execute as close to nationally as our store footprint and our customer footprint will allow us to.
But there is this constant conversation about what I’ll call a consortium. You have to quickly assess privacy when you’re thinking about things that we would white label for the market. And there may be tools and technology that we could white label. But when it gets to the data piece, that’s where it gets really tricky for lots of really good reasons when you consider how privacy laws work, and most importantly, what our customers are asking and permissioning us to do.
Where is Albertsons Media Collective leveraging AI right now? What are Albertsons’ future plans for it?
The primary use that we’re using it for right now is what we call “the execution.” If you think of the impact of AI on media planning and buying, it’s actually quite exciting.
There’s a lot of manual labor media planning and buying, especially when you’re talking about digital and the need to optimize. And the more cycles of optimization you can do the better the performances. And at some point, humans have to sleep and machines don’t, so our ability to keep up and push through high-volume campaign planning and execution and optimization is a real plus for us.
In terms of generating multiple versions of creative assets, AI is a huge plus for us as well because, along with optimizing media itself, it’s optimizing the creative executions. And to have multiple versions available that, again, machines can do more fluidly than humans can, it all just leads to stronger performance across the board.
What we’re all still trying to figure out is how AI helps with content, specifically as we push into television and Connected TV (CTV). For the most part with video, you’ll tend to get a produced video asset from the brand, but then if you want to make it commerce enabled, there’s more that you add to it. And I think the real questions are “Does AI help with that simple versioning?” and “How do we set up the creative process to be able to quickly adapt for commerce use?”
Where does Albertsons stand with in-store retail media?
We are right in the middle of, “What is this thing and how do we capitalize on it?”
The one thing that is really missing is standardization for in-store retail media. So our stores have multiple vendors who have individual ad platforms, but no one place where it’s all centralized and simple to execute. So how do we do fuel pump ads versus the paper tags on the shelves versus the digital signs in the deli section? Those are all different suppliers.
Our ability to serve ads from one place and then measure the stores as a media channel is widely complicated and that’s what we are all wrestling with right now as an industry.
The potential is there, but the ability to execute at scale is still the piece to be solved — I think we’ll have that solved soon.
What would you like to see Albertsons Media Collective pursue in the future?
So we’re currently operating like a media company, but is that the only thing that we should be or is there more opportunity in how we bring our audiences to market, how we bring measurement to market? And how do we bring some of the technology we’ve built in service of retail media to market?
I am also super excited because I actually think retail media can make some more traditional channels like CTV and linear TV far more performant than they’ve been in the past. If you think of using our audiences and then show that it drove sales, it’s a very different metric than where television has been, which has been impressions and impressions served.
Is there anything right now that you think suppliers and advertisers want from grocers that they aren’t currently getting?
Upper funnel. How do we do more brand and awareness-building activities? Our measurement is all about lower funnel, last click-to-drive purchase. But more and more there’s demand for understanding how retail media works more on the brand side.
There is an approach to this and one of the things that Albertsons is working on is who to integrate into some of the marketing mix modeling that our bigger brands and clients are using right now so that they can start to understand the impact of retail media. I think what you have to do though in order to move further up the funnel is you have to have the right kind of content, and most of our content right now is in its simplest form of “price and item” that isn’t necessarily known as being a brand builder.
