What is it they say about London buses? Hot on the heels of its eye-catching tie-up with Ocado, Asda has announced another major tech deal, this time with Amazon.
From September, the supermarket will be adopting the Silicon Valley giant’s online ad-tech platform Amazon Ads across all its websites, in a move it claims will “transform” its retail media offering for shoppers and suppliers.
It’s no secret why Asda is seemingly suddenly announcing a flurry of tech deals. Finally free from the shackles of Walmart’s systems following last summer’s completion of Project Future, it’s making up for lost time trying to stem its bleeding market share.
But there are major opportunities for the supermarket as well, chief customer and digital officer Rachel Eyre told The Grocer.
Speaking from Cannes, Eyre – now nearly 10 months into her new role – said the partnership marked a significant milestone for Amazon too. Asda is the first UK grocer to adopt its new tech. The supermarket could have chosen from a plethora of ad-tech platforms, but specifically chose Amazon Ads for that key strategic reason.
“The UK grocery retail media market is fragmented,” she explained. “There’s friction in the end-to-end experience and we hear that feedback consistently. But advertisers know how to use Amazon Ads, they’re already using it and they like using it. We believe this will make Asda the easiest UK grocer to work with.”
Customers, she adds, will also reap the benefits, with more “contextually relevant” ads and web searches when using Asda.com and George.com.
Benefits of data
Sceptics of retail media – of which there are many – would be quick to question whether it really benefits customers. But few could argue that, if this move lands well, it will boost Asda’s ability to compete in an increasingly lucrative field. UK advertising spend is set to hit £45bn in 2026, according to IAB, and digital retail media will account for £1.5bn of that.
Then there’s the revenue stream retailers have generally been less keen to talk about: data.
“If you take Amazon’s technology and combine it with Asda’s brand assets and customer data, there’s a real opportunity to have interesting conversations with brands outside the grocery, retail and fmcg space,” Eyre said. “For brands looking to connect with a large audience we understand deeply, that will be appealing.”
By harnessing Amazon’s machine learning-powered closed loop measurement, Asda will also be able to better analyse its own dataset of 18 million customers, using those insights to attract non-endemic brands to either advertise, or use its data.
“That in turn will have commercial benefits for Asda, which we can reinvest in our customers,” Eyre adds.
Will a new retail media partnership alone be enough to turn around an Asda ship that increasingly seems to be heading towards the iceberg after continued market share declines? No, says Eyre, and it’s not meant to.
But alongside the Ocado deal, planned improvements to Asda Rewards, as well as the much-needed efforts to improve in-store experience as part of Eyre’s recently launched Take A Fresh Look campaign, it can help bring shoppers back.
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