Dive Brief:
- Giant Eagle and GetGo Cafe + Market, the grocer’s convenience store arm, joined Wegmans in linking their retail media platforms to Rippl, a data and media network that creates a single access point for advertising partners working with regional grocers, Amit Gupta, chief operating officer of Rippl’s parent company Cardlytics, said in an interview with sister publication Grocery Dive.
- The tie-up will help boost the scale of Giant Eagle’s Leap Media Network while allowing it to remain an in-house operation for the grocer.
- The partnership comes at a time when many c-store chains are just starting to explore the retail media space.
Dive Insight:
Regional grocers and most c-store companies lack the scale of national competitors — a challenge Giant Eagle aims to address with its Rippl partnership, Joell Robinson, a senior director for the grocer who leads Leap’s sales and account management, said in an interview. She also noted that this partnership meets CPGs’ desires to have access to multiple regional grocers.
Robinson added that Leap will lean on Rippl to help meld its closed-loop reporting with the technology company’s standardized, first-party data metrics.
Gupta noted that Rippl was designed specifically for regional grocers as well as convenience store chains. It is a product of data company Bridg, according to Gupta, who also serves as Bridg’s general manager. While Bridg provides scale capabilities and consumer data-collecting technology, it is geared toward larger, national retailers with retail media networks. Rippl’s role is to consolidate smaller retailers’ retail media platforms while still providing them with large-scale capabilities.
Rippl currently gives advertisers access to 70 million anonymized shopper profiles, and around 15% of those profiles belong to Giant Eagle shoppers, according to a spokesperson.
The “identity resolution capabilities” Rippl offers its retail partners and their advertisers include shopper profiles with over 140 attributes, transaction data, shopper behavior insights and basket affinities, Gupta said. He noted that CPGs and advertisers can use this information to present ads to curated audiences.
According to Robinson, Rippl’s privacy policy as well as its technology capabilities were primary reasons Giant Eagle decided to link Leap to the platform. Rippl offers Giant Eagle and GetGo the opportunity for additional offsite activation with its scaled multi-retailer network, while Leap runs point on on-site and in-store inventory, she said.
“They are going to be a technology company and we are going to be a grocer at the end of the day,” Robinson said.
While numerous grocers have established retail media networks over the past few years, only a few large-scale c-store chains have done so. In March, Wawa introduced its entry into the space, Goose Media Network, joining 7-Eleven and Casey’s General Stores.
