Digital Retail Media – How to acquire more supermarket shoppers in 2025
Ashleigh Chalmers • 13th May 2025
In an increasingly competitive retail landscape, getting your food or drink products onto a supermarket shelf is extremely challenging. Keeping them there can be even more challenging.
In 2025, much like in the last decade, consumer behaviour and economic pressures are influencing spending habits, making acquiring new supermarket shoppers both more difficult and more critical than ever to keeping your SKUs ‘physically available’ in store. Brand, marketing and shopper marketing teams are therefore even more challenged to spend their budgets in the most effective way possible to reach potential new shoppers, activate and protect existing shoppers and drive sales growth year on year.
This poses the question: How do you acquire more supermarket shoppers?
A natural place to start is to consider using sophisticated targeting to reach the right shoppers in the first place. This is where Digital Retail Media comes in.
Digital Retail Media as a proposition has emerged, in various guises in the last few years, offering brands the opportunity to hyper-target shoppers at specific supermarkets in the UK. In this blog, we explore how this has enhanced opportunities for brands to acquire new supermarket shoppers and how this can be measured in 2025 & beyond.
But first, what is Digital Retail Media?
Digital Retail Media, in this blog, can be considered to include any digital media channel where first-party shopper data can be applied as targeting. This first-party data is usually acquired through loyalty scheme sign-ups like Tesco Clubcard or Sainsbury’s Nectar Card.
Rich, first-party data, allows Digital Retail Media campaigns to deliver flexible, highly targeted and measurable activity across media channels. Supermarkets like Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Asda have already invested heavily in Digital Retail Media and are actively monetising their audiences by allowing brands to activate them across several media channels, as well as ‘on-site’ on their respective online stores. Broader Digital Retail Media opportunities also include online D2C stores like Ocado and Amazon, and even Quick Commerce activations through UberEATS & Deliveroo.
Digital Retail Media can be activated through both shopper marketing and brand marketing budgets. In some cases, it can even be activated through committed Joint Business Plan (JBP) budgets.
Advancements in targeting via digital retail media (vs traditional shopper marketing activities) have opened the door for FMCG brands to make their shopper marketing budget work harder. Below we will explore the targeting and measurement tools that Digital Retail Media can offer brands who are looking to explore this approach to acquire more shoppers.
How does Digital Retail Media targeting work?
Using supermarket loyalty data, Digital Retail Media, allows us to target segments of shoppers who are statistically more likely to buy a brand’s products – limiting any potential budget wastage.
Some examples of Digital Retail Media targeting that could be used to encourage new customer acquisition include:
- Competitor buyers: Shoppers who have actively purchased from a brand’s in-category competitors, but who have not bought from the brand.
- Subcategory Buyers: Shoppers who have bought from a specific subcategory within the last 3 shops, who are considered a regular shopper of that subcategory.
- Brand Acquisition Candidates: shoppers who are a lookalike of the brand’s shoppers but have never bought the brand’s products.
- Events/Seasonal Shoppers: Activating shoppers who are known to spend larger amounts on specific holidays/events like Easter, Mother’s Day or Christmas, based on the previous year’s behaviour.
Audiences like the examples above can be de-duplicated and their sales performance measured against one another to determine which audiences delivered the highest exposed shopper sales and best return on ad spend (ROAS).
These audiences are owned by the supermarket and essentially ‘on loan’ for the duration of an activation across any of the media channels that offer the data integration, making it easy for both the brand and supermarket to maintain GDPR compliance.
How is Digital Retail Media measured?
Digital Retail Media offers closed loop measurement, again tracked via loyalty card data. In other words, we can see whether potential shoppers who have been exposed to an advert have gone on to purchase the product during the campaign period.
Typical measurement reporting includes:
- Sales Value & Volume by SKU, often this is also split by the SKUs featured in the ad creative and a brand level to highlight the halo effect of sales on the brand overall.
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) measurement. How much money did a brand make in sales for every £1 spent on advertising to the specific target audiences?
- Delivery metrics. How many impressions were delivered? How many potential shoppers were reached during the campaign period?
- Audience A vs Audience B. As mentioned above, analysing audience performance vs each other can inform future campaigns and identify where spend can be used most effectively.
With this level of closed loop measurement, we can see the impact of each individual campaign on bottom line sales, making each Digital Retail Media activation more attributable and measurable than traditional shopper activations – with the added benefit of audience learnings along the way!
What does it mean for your brand?
Ultimately, Digital Retail Media offers brands the opportunity to reach the right shoppers at the right time and to simultaneously prove how marketing investment can drive shoppers to purchase.
If you’re interested in learning more about digital retail media, shopper marketing or want to discuss your food or drink brand’s strategy, we’d love to hear from you! Get in touch with our Digital Retail Media team today.
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Interested in acquiring more supermarket shoppers through Digital Retail Media? Give us a call, or complete the form. We’ll put the kettle on and by the time you get here we’ll already be thinking about your business.
