Kevel, Dollar General, and The Trade Desk announced a retail media solution that connects in-store and online activation, allowing brands to run unified campaigns across both channels, according to The Retail Bulletin. A brand selling snacks can now book a Dollar General endcap display and programmatic banner ads through the same interface, with shared audience targeting and attribution.
The mechanics work through Kevel's infrastructure layer, which ingests Dollar General's first-party shopper data and surfaces it to The Trade Desk's demand-side platform. A brand's buyer selects audience segments—say, households that purchased crackers in the past 30 days—and deploys creative across Dollar General's digital properties and physical stores simultaneously. The same customer ID graph tracks whether a shopper saw the online ad, then bought in-store, or vice versa. The three companies built a closed-loop measurement feed that reports both impressions and point-of-sale conversions back to the brand within 48 hours.
This works because retail media has fragmented into two disconnected buckets. Onsite media—banners on a retailer's website or app—lives in one buying system. Offsite media—programmatic display, social, connected TV—lives in another. In-store media—endcaps, shelf talkers, checkout screens—often requires a separate sales team and insertion order. A brand running a national launch across all three has been juggling three contracts, three reporting dashboards, and no shared view of which customer saw what. Kevel's platform normalizes the data schemas so one audience segment can activate across all three surfaces without manual reconciliation.
The reason this matters for physical products is that most consumer packaged goods still sell overwhelmingly in physical stores. Dollar General operates over 20,000 locations and serves 18 million customers weekly, according to the company's investor materials. A brand that drives online impressions but cannot connect them to the shelf loses the last mile. Conversely, a brand that buys endcap space but cannot retarget the shopper who walked past it wastes the top of the funnel. The unified layer closes both gaps.
A small brand can run a scaled-down version without enterprise contracts. Start by identifying one regional retailer that offers both digital media and in-store placements—many grocery and convenience chains now do. Approach the retailer's media sales team and ask if they can bundle a digital campaign with an in-store promotion, even informally. Offer to share sales data so the retailer can prove attribution to future advertisers. If the retailer lacks infrastructure, use a simple Google Sheet to track SKU movement during the campaign window and compare it to a control location. The goal is to demonstrate incrementality, which makes the retailer more willing to co-market and share shelf space.
For a brand with modest budget, the play is a two-week test in 50-100 stores. Negotiate a small digital buy on the retailer's site or app—often available for as little as $2,000 minimum spend. Pair it with an in-store promotion: a clip strip, case stack, or register display. Use the same creative and offer across both. Measure basket lift by comparing sales in those stores to matched control stores without the digital layer. If the digital exposure drives a 10-15% lift in physical sell-through, you have proof to expand or pitch similar programs to other retailers. The Kevel-Dollar General-Trade Desk integration is enterprise-scale, but the principle—one audience, two surfaces, shared measurement—applies at any size.
The broader pattern is that retail media is consolidating from a patchwork of point solutions into full-stack platforms that own the entire customer journey. Brands that move early to test unified onsite-offsite-in-store campaigns will have cleaner attribution and more leverage with retailers when these systems become table stakes.
The takeaway
Unified retail media lets one audience buy trigger both digital ads and in-store displays, with shared attribution across channels.
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