Kroger reported its strongest retail media profit growth since 2021, according to Modern Retail, as the grocery chain expanded its internal advertising network that sells audience access to consumer-packaged-goods brands. The mechanism: Kroger controls 84.51 million loyalty cardholders and uses that first-party purchase data to let brands like Unilever or Procter & Gamble buy ad placements in Kroger's email newsletters, mobile app, and in-store digital screens. The brand pays Kroger per impression or click, and Kroger keeps the margin because it already owns the infrastructure and the audience relationship.

What Kroger did was package its existing customer touchpoints — the weekly email circulars, the app home screen, the checkout kiosk — as inventory that suppliers could buy. A snack brand launching a new flavor pays Kroger to feature a sponsored recipe in the email that goes to shoppers who previously bought similar items. A beverage company buys a banner in the app for users within five miles of a store running a promotion. Kroger calls this model Kroger Precision Marketing, and the company disclosed that the unit's profit growth outpaced its traditional grocery-margin improvements for the first time in two years.

The play works because Kroger monetizes attention it was already generating. The grocer sends weekly emails regardless, and the app loads a home screen every session. By reserving a block of that real estate for paid placements, Kroger converts a cost center — email production, app maintenance — into a revenue line with gross margins near 70 percent, per industry retail-media benchmarks. The advertiser gets performance attribution because Kroger tracks whether the exposed shopper bought the product in-store or online, then shares anonymized lift data. That closed-loop reporting justifies higher CPMs than social or search, where the brand cannot confirm the ad led to a grocery-cart addition.

The mechanism also works because suppliers already spend trade dollars with Kroger for endcap displays and shelf positioning. Retail media simply shifts some of that budget from physical placement to digital placement, often with better targeting. A brand running a store demo in ten Midwest locations can now buy email ads only to loyalty members in those ZIP codes, increasing foot traffic to the sampling table. Kroger benefits because the supplier pays twice: once for the demo space, once for the digital awareness.

A small physical-product brand steals this by treating its owned channels — email list, SMS subscribers, unboxing inserts — as ad inventory another non-competing brand will pay to access. You sell candles and have 2,000 email subscribers who buy twice a year. A bath-salt brand with a similar customer profile offers you $200 to include a one-line product mention and discount code in your next shipment thank-you card. You print the message on the existing card stock, no extra fulfillment cost. You split revenue if the code converts, or you charge a flat fee per thousand inserts. Start with brands in your supply chain: your packaging supplier might pay to be mentioned as a sustainability partner, your shipping carrier might sponsor a "track your order" SMS. Build the pitch: audience size, average order value, purchase frequency, and whether you can track conversions through a unique code. Send it to three brands this week whose product complements yours and whose customer likely overlaps. Price the first deal at cost recovery — $50 to $150 — to prove the model, then raise rates once you show conversion data.

The broader pattern is that any brand with a repeat buyer and a communication channel now operates a small media network. The profit accrues not to the largest list but to the one that instruments attribution and sells access before a competitor does.