Dollar General Ramps up Media Network to Reach Meta Platforms and Rural Customers

Dollar General will invest $100 million in increasing employees' hours.

Dollar General is rapidly expanding its DG Media Network (DGMN) through partnerships with Meta and LiveRamp. The Meta partnership will enable DGMN’s brand partners to reach Dollar General’s more than 90 million unique customer profiles across the Meta ecosystem. LiveRamp helped run a campaign aimed at giving brands the insight needed to better collaborate with DGMN to reach rural customers.

The partnership between DGMN and Meta is the result of an earlier test, and the deal makes Dollar General the first retailer to offer Meta’s Advanced Analytics solution. Brands will now be able to make ad placements that target Dollar General customers in spaces including Facebook and Instagram News Feeds, Stories and Reels.

Advanced Analytics also will enable DGMN to measure and analyze the impact of its efforts in a secure environment. Execs can evaluate the business impact of Meta marketing investments for a given brand, uncover new insights and study quantifiable metrics, including return on ad spend. The test period found that DGMN has the ability to reach customers across 1,400 derived attributes.

“We are thrilled to debut this market-first initiative, allowing our advertisers to reach Dollar General customers via Meta placements while utilizing our opted-in first-party data,” said Charlene Charles, Head of DG Media Network Operations in a statement. “Our team provides full end-to-end campaign support and creative services while measuring closed-loop, attributable store sales. We look forward to extending the reach of DGMN through the world’s largest social platform to deliver even more effective media for our advertisers.”

The LiveRamp campaign was designed to provide Dollar General and its brand partners with a deeper understanding of hard-to-reach rural audiences across populations and geographies, to create a more robust and dynamic view of customers all the way from exposure to purchase. The partnership is aimed at giving brand partners an alternative to high-volume efficiency strategies that focus on audiences in densely populated markets — strategies that leave out the 46 million Americans living in remote places where internet access is scattered.

As a result of LiveRamp and DGMN’s partnership, CPG marketers have benefitted from the ability to:

  • Reach nearly 100% of Dollar General’s customers, with the goal of enabling advertisers to build awareness and drive purchase consideration online and in-store;
  • Improve analytics and measurement for brands and their agencies with closed-loop reporting, self-service measurement of sales attribution and incremental lift and audience building;
  • Access real-time customer data in 47 states to gain insight into more than two billion transactions annually; and
  • Engage in privacy-centric data collaboration with more than 50 additional companies for improved incremental return on advertising spend.

“Brands want to engage with the customer and provide tailored, personalized recommendations, from cereal to personal care essentials,” said Chad Fox, VP, Chief Marketing Officer at Dollar General in a statement. “We now have a sophisticated platform that enables us to serve our communities in a personalized way.”