Dive Brief:

• Albertsons’ retail media division announced Tuesday the integration of sponsored product placement into the grocery company’s artificial intelligence-powered conversational search tool. 
• The new capability, powered by commerce intelligence platform Criteo, enables brands to influence shoppers as they plan meals, search for products and build baskets. 
• The announcement comes as the rapid evolution and ongoing adoption of AI in the grocery industry provide new advertising capabilities for retailers and CPGs.

Dive Insight:

As shoppers continue to use AI to streamline their grocery shopping and planning, Albertsons Media Collective is further bringing this capability in-house — and this latest integration also aligns brands closer with shoppers at points of high purchase intent.

Albertsons said its expanded partnership with Criteo modernizes its existing conversational search feature. Now, select sponsored products can appear within Albertsons’ search product carousels that are relevant to shoppers’ search queries, according to the press release. 

“This integration is about creating retail media that helps customers along their shopping journey, showing up in ways that are useful and additive to their experience, while giving advertisers a new path to engage closer to the moment of purchase,” Jill Pavlovich, Albertsons’ senior vice president of digital customer experience, said in a statement. 

This is not the first time Albertsons Media Collective has looked to third-party partnerships to enhance its in-house retail media operations. The company has tapped Collective TV, Rokt and Capgemini in the past, and also worked with Criteo in early 2023 to improve access to demand- and supply-side advertising capabilities to drive measurable commerce outcomes.

Last week, Albertsons Media Collective announced it has started offering branded entertainment that leverages first-party data and can be distributed through the grocer’s media network.