Mercatus, a leading provider in digital commerce solutions for grocery retail, today announced Mercatus Digital Advertising, an entirely new capability that combines the company’s integrated eCommerce platform with a scalable and professionally managed native advertising program powered in partnership with CitrusAd, the world’s leading retail media platform. Mercatus-equipped grocers can use this high-value digital advertising solution to drive additional revenue from their eCommerce storefronts and claim their share of national CPG digital ad dollars.
Weis Markets, Smart & Final, and Piggly Wiggly Midwest will be the first Mercatus clients to adopt the solution. Additional Mercatus retailers will join the network in the coming months.
In partnering with CitrusAd, Mercatus gains access to cutting-edge, retail media technology to enable contextual and compelling native advertising throughout the online shopping journey. Retailers using the Mercatus eCommerce platform also benefit from the CitrusAd Network’s retail media sales expertise to help drive additional revenue by monetizing traffic on their web and mobile digital commerce sites.
For grocery retailers, online advertising media can be complicated, with several interconnected systems that require significant investments in campaign management and maintenance. With digital advertising now available on the Mercatus platform, Mercatus grocery retailers have access to a turnkey solution with powerful native ad targeting and reporting transparency.
Mercatus will manage the operation of digital campaigns on behalf of its retailers. With visibility into campaign performance metrics, Mercatus will work collaboratively with retail partners and brand advertisers to optimize campaign performance and maximize advertising revenue on grocers’ branded eCommerce sites.
Digital advertising on the Mercatus platform offers grocery retailers a more effective experience than traditional online display advertising. Targeted product search, category results and native display ads integrate seamlessly with the online shopping experience, encouraging shoppers to add contextual and relevant consumer brand offers directly to their digital carts instead of being redirected off site and interrupting the buyer’s journey. This enables grocers to offer high-conversion, personalized ad placements to CPGs and compete against grocery retail giants like Instacart, Walmart, Target, Kroger and Amazon for a greater share of the more than $11 billion available CPG online ad spend.
“Too often, grocers’ digital advertising is a disjointed experience, lacking the ability to monetize their digital presence at scale and offer the self-managed advertising capabilities and real-time reporting that brands get with larger players,” said Brad Moran, CEO, CitrusAd. “With CitrusAd powering Mercatus Digital Advertising, grocery retailers now have a clear-cut alternative to optimize their online ad programs, simplifying the advertising process both internally, and for brand advertisers and media agencies, as well as winning a bigger slice of media revenue.”
The partnership with CitrusAd means Mercatus can provide its retail partners immediate access to all the national brand advertisers and media agencies on the CitrusAd Network. Using existing promotional assets, and a standardized digital ad publishing workflow, national CPGs can now reach and incentivize the hundreds of thousands of shoppers that use the Mercatus platform with hyper-relevant, targeted native advertising.
“As online grocery sales continue to grow and traditional media channels wane in their effectiveness and popularity, digital advertising on the Mercatus platform using the CitrusAd Network will help grocery retailers access a revenue stream previously monopolized by tier-one competitors and delivery-provider marketplaces,” said Sylvain Perrier, president and CEO, Mercatus. “Consumer brands and their media agencies are searching for more direct, lower-funnel conversion at the point of purchase. And that’s exactly what Mercatus Digital Advertising offers. In contrast to other retail media aggregators, grocers using the Mercatus platform can benefit by winning a significant share of online advertising revenue, enough to offset costs and quickly achieve eCommerce profitability.”
