Kroger Delivers its First-Party Data to the Yahoo DSP

Yahoo Advertising and Kroger Precision Marketing (KPM) — the retail media business of Kroger, powered by 84.51° — are teaming up to bring Kroger’s first-party, purchase-based audiences to the Yahoo Demand-Side Platform (DSP). Yahoo DSP advertisers can now activate KPM’s audiences to reach targeted consumers with their advertising and measure campaign results.

While off-site advertising has become a prime target for growing retail media networks as they look to compete amid increasing competition, Kroger has only made its data available in one other major DSP, The Trade Desk, prior to this deal with Yahoo.

“Advertisers on average see 6.5X higher return on ad spend when using our precision audiences,” said Cara Pratt, SVP of KPM in a statement. “By expanding our availability through the Yahoo DSP, we’re delivering even more meaningful messages and measurable brand impact.”

The deal also represents a big win for Yahoo, which has been working on ways to help advertisers maintain performance once cookies go away (although the timeline on that has again been delayed by Google, this time until 2025). Yahoo’s answer is its Yahoo Identity Solutions cookie alternative, which was recently expanded to support CTV and streaming platforms. To date, 48,000 publisher domains have adopted Yahoo Identity Solutions in anticipation of the deprecation of third-party identifiers.

The underpinning of Yahoo Identity Solutions is Yahoo ConnectID, a collection of 205 million authenticated U.S. users from consented relationships and partners. The addition of purchase-based audiences from retailers like Kroger creates new ways for brands to understand which audience segments will drive incremental growth. On the measurement side, advertisers can use the KPM platform to attribute store sales to media exposures from the Yahoo DSP. Only mutual customers of the Yahoo DSP and KPM will benefit from the collaboration. 

“Using first-party data is crucial to future-proof against third-party cookie deprecation, and applying Kroger’s retail data will help to ensure addressability for our advertisers,” said Elizabeth Herbst-Brady, Chief Revenue Officer at Yahoo in a statement. “This new offering not only reinforces our privacy-safe approach, but also demonstrates our commitment to interoperability and allows advertisers to activate high-quality data across campaigns through the Yahoo DSP.”

To learn more about retail media, check out our full guide here.