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EXCLUSIVE Q&A: Albertsons builds on success of in-house media network

Albertsons

Albertsons Companies Inc. continues expanding the scope and capabilities of its retail media arm.

In an exclusive Q&A interview held at the recent NRF 2025: Retail’s Big Show in New York City, Michelle Weiskittel, senior director, retail media network media, creative and operations of Albertsons Media Collective and Liz Roche, VP of media and measurement, Albertsons Media Collective, spoke with Chain Store Age about how and why the grocery giant developed its media network, the results it has obtained and the vision for the future. 

What made Albertsons decide to launch a retail media network?

Michelle Weiskittel: I started my career with Albertsons on the enterprise marketing side, and there were natural moments that were important to shoppers, but also important to our CPG brand partners that sold products in our stores. 

We started with an event strategy around our key shopper moments, and from there, the importance just grew. We initially outsourced some of that activity, but because of the integration we needed with our merchandising team, we decided to bring it in house. 

[READ MORE: Albertsons delivers branded ad content to shoppers]

What kind of results have you gotten from your retail media network?

MW: Albertsons is a media company, but we are a retailer first. What we want to do for our shoppers aligns very closely to what our CPG partners expect, and so we can come at it from a business objective and resolve our shopper solutions together. We have a solution suite measuring the incrementality of our customers’ shopping behaviors. 

What kind of response have you gotten from CPG participants?

Liz Roche: I'm feeling really energized from our conversations with our CPG clients. What makes Albertsons, and especially what makes the collective, unique is our passion for innovation and for bringing the most effective product to market and serving our clients in that way. I would say on the whole, it seems like our CPG clients are very excited.

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How are customers responding to getting highly targeted advertisements?

MW: Our customers are responding positively, and we are able to reach them digitally in our store and on our owned and operated properties.

LR: We measure the effectiveness of all our campaigns with customers, and then we have joint business planning goals with our CPGs to make sure we're delivering against their larger initiatives as well.

Are there any future plans you can discuss for the media collective?

MW: This year we have a robust roadmap to drive our efficiency and also our effectiveness. Efficiency boils down to how quickly can we get to market to solve our clients’ needs, while efficiency comes down to results in driving sales or incremental volume of units.

I’m also excited about bringing together the insights that Albertsons Media Collective has in order to create automation around our main media planning process, which will deliver quicker insight and performance for our clients.

LR: Albertsons is also focused on bringing more transparency to the measurement process. We have a few big announcements that we just rolled out. One is our partnership with TransUnion to enable our CPG clients to measure their media more effectively. 

We also have API access to campaign-level results for our partners. The name of the game is making sure that they can be efficient; that they can access an API and also understand the results, with Albertsons being as transparent as possible.

In 2025, bringing media and measurement together at Albertsons Media Collective is a huge strategic move. It incorporates the retail media side as well as merchandising, and we have a lot of plans to continue breaking down these silos to deliver a better experience to our shoppers and better results for our clients. 

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