Walgreens Doubles Down on Its Advertising Business

Walgreens Doubles Down on Its Advertising Business

by Tim Colucci Advertising

In December 2020, Walgreens launched its own advertising business, Walgreens Advertising Group, wag.  Now Walgreens is doubling down on advertising by expanding wag’s capabilities into over-the-top (OTT) services, connected TV (CTV) and traditional linear TV across 100 apps and 10 supply-side platforms, with an inventory of 2.5 billion daily impressions. This development demonstrates a growing trend of retailers using their customer data to provide advertising services.

What Walgreens Announced

Walgreens has touted wag as an effective way to leverage insights from 100+ million Walgreens loyalty members and one billion daily digital touchpoints with customers to create personalized advertising. wag provides businesses access to advertising platforms on Walgreens-owned and third-party channels, with the potential of achieving higher match rates versus the industry standard method of digital media buying. wag provides the ability to reach shoppers across digital display, video, social, streaming audio, email as well as Walgreens digital platforms and stores. On May 17, Walgreens announced that wag will extend its reach into television. According to Walgreens, the new capability consists of:

  • The addition of OTT & CTV inventory accessible via the wagDSP — a proprietary programmatic buying technology that integrates Walgreens customer and transaction data with dynamic creative capabilities and real-time optimization.
  • A first-to-market collaboration with OpenAP, and integration with the OpenID that enables brands to reach audiences powered by Walgreens first-party data as part of their television buys. Brands will be able to collaborate with Walgreens to execute against deterministic audiences now, and closed loop measurement will be in place by the start of the broadcast year.

Inventory is sourced through 100+ apps and 10 supply-side platforms with 2.5 billion+ available impressions daily, including access to inventory from key platforms.

Brands activating against this inventory can do so with all of the same functionality, optimization, and measurement capability as in digital video and display executed through the wagDSP. This enables people based media targeting, with measurement and real-time optimization.

Why the Expansion of Walgreens Advertising Group Matters

This news matters for two reasons:

  • wag’s expansion is part of a broader effort by retailers to capitalize on their own-first party data to provide advertising services. Retailers such as Amazon, Dollar Tree, Kroger, Macy’s, Target, and Walmart are all monetizing their first-party customer data by building ad businesses. Each retailer can give advertisers access to different types of consumers. For instance, wag gives advertisers access to consumers in the health and wellness space, and Macy’s is geared toward businesses wanting to reach fashion-conscious shoppers. We expect more of these platforms to emerge as businesses seek alternative ways to reach consumers amid the demise of third-party cookies, which are crucial for third-party ad targeting. With third-party ad targeting across the web threatened, platforms that give advertisers entree to shoppers within retailers’ walled gardens are more appealing.

What Advertisers Should Do

We suggest that advertisers:

  • Consider retailer-based ad networks as a complement to your existing digital ad strategy, not as a replacement. If your strategy focuses on Facebook and Google, for instance, don’t move your ad dollars over to a retailer network. Remember that Facebook and Google also already offer proven advertising products that capitalize on their vast user base. For example, location-based digital advertising tools help strengthen Google’s advertising services at the local level.
  • Do, however, monitor the effectiveness of your advertising on Facebook and Google amid the demise of third-party cookies and the onset of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, which includes more privacy controls that may make Facebook ads less effective (which remains to be seen).
  • Learn more about the ad products that might apply to you – and those products are evolving, as the expansion of wag demonstrates. In addition, we recently blogged about how Amazon is creating more ad units. The time may come soon when advertising on the web means constantly capitalizing on walled gardens’ offerings.
  • Work with an agency partner that knows the terrain. For instance, at True Interactive, we help businesses advertise through connected TV, complementing our deep expertise with online advertising on Google, social media, and the retailer networks such as Amazon and Walmart.

Contact True Interactive

To succeed with online advertising, contact True Interactive. Read about some of our client work here.

Google Rejects Alternatives to Cookie Tracking: Advertiser Q&A

Google Rejects Alternatives to Cookie Tracking: Advertiser Q&A

by Mark Smith Google

Google recently made another major announcement in its quest to usher in a cookie-less world. Recall that in January 2020, Google said it was going to phase out third-party cookies on Chrome in a bid to protect consumer privacy more effectively. On March 3, Google published an update: Google will not build alternative tracking technologies (or use those being developed by other companies) for its own ad buying tools to replace third-party cookies. Let’s take a closer look at what Google announced.

What exactly did Google announce?

Google said that once third-party cookies are phased out of Chrome browsers, Google will not build alternative identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will Google use them in its products. Examples of those alternative identifiers include Unified ID and LiveRamp IdentityLink.

Instead, Google wants advertisers to adopt cohort-based targeting, or grouping people based on their common browsing behavior as an alternative to third-party cookies. Specifically, Google is advocating for the adoption of FLoCs (federated learning cohorts) developed out Google’s own Privacy Sandbox initiative. According to Google,

. . . our latest tests of FLoC show one way to effectively take third-party cookies out of the advertising equation and instead hide individuals within large crowds of people with common interests. Chrome intends to make FLoC-based cohorts available for public testing through origin trials with its next release this month, and we expect to begin testing FLoC-based cohorts with advertisers in Google Ads in Q2. Chrome also will offer the first iteration of new user controls in April and will expand on these controls in future releases, as more proposals reach the origin trial stage, and they receive more feedback from end users and the industry.

How will online advertising be affected?

It’s likely that advertisers will still be able to create targeted ads based on user behavior – but the ads will be based on larger cohorts of people based on their common browsing behavior as an alternative to third-party cookies. Google told The Wall Street Journal that ads using cohort-based targeting have performed nearly as well as the existing tools that target consumers individually.

But no one yet knows exactly how targeting will change. As Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing and communication officer at Mastercard, told The Wall Street Journal, “When you’re able to target precisely to individuals your effectiveness is very high. When you’re doing it to cohorts it’s bound to be lesser than the individual, but we don’t know how much less at this point in time.”

What should advertisers do?

We always recommend that when Google makes a major change to its products that advertisers keep a close watch on their spend and costs especially for any potential near-term fluctuations. (If you are a True Interactive client, we do that for you.) Beyond that, it’s time to wait and see. The worst action to take is to stop advertising on Google. Google remains the Number One digital advertising platform, even if targeting consumer behavior across Google’s universe changes from personal to cohort-based targeting.

Also:

  • Keep an eye on how the Google sandbox initiative evolves especially as Google begins testing FloC with advertisers in the second quarter.
  • Consider tapping into your own first-party data more effectively to create ads (and True Interactive can help you do so). As Google pointed out, “We will continue to support first-party relationships on our ad platforms for partners, in which they have direct connections with their own customers. And we’ll deepen our support for solutions that build on these direct relationships between consumers and the brands and publishers they engage with.”
  • Google’s FloC may not be your only alternative, the March 3 announcement notwithstanding. Watch the development initiatives such as Unified ID 2.0, which is a next generation identity solution built on an open-source digital framework. Unified ID 2.0 is the result of a collaboration among publishers, buyers, and technology providers. According to a recent announcement, Unified ID 2.0 serves as an alternative to third-party cookies. Unified ID 2.0 aims to improve consumer transparency, privacy, and control, while preserving the value exchange of relevant advertising across channels and devices. Tom Kershaw, the chief technology officer of Magnite and chairman of Prebid.org — which is the operator of Unified ID 2.0 — dismissed the Google news. He told Campaign that Google’s March 3 announcement has zero effect on Unified ID 2.0. He also said that he was never under an impression that Google would participate in Unified ID 2.0. For more insight, read his newly published commentary on AdExchanger.
  • Consider ad platforms such as Amazon Advertising and Walmart Connect, which give businesses entrée to a vast base of customers who search and shop on Amazon and Walmart. True Interactive offers services on both platforms in addition to our longstanding work on Google, Bing, and other platforms.

Contact True Interactive

To succeed with online advertising, contact True Interactive. Read about some of our client work here.

Image by Photo Mix from Pixabay