Founded by Joe Albertson in 1939 in Boise, Idaho, USA, Albertson Companies has become a leading US grocery chain, operating 2200 stores across 34 states in the US, under the Albertsons banner and as Acme Markets. It has been a leading player in the omnichannel shift in grocery in the US, prioritising personalised service across stores via its extensive loyalty programme, click and collect, a mobile shopping app and ecommerce website.
The company’s loyalty programme – Albertsons for U – boasts more than 45 million members and continues to grow at some 15% per year and it is this in combination with its omni-channel approach and focus on customer service that has seen it become something of a retail media star.
In needs it too. The retailer was locked in long-running merger talks with fellow US grocery chain Kroger, which collapsed in late 2024. Had the merger gone ahead, it would have created a retail and retail data giant that could’ve rivalled Walmart in the US. That is no longer an option for Albertsons.
However, with 7% of its annual revenue now coming from advertising sales, the time is now to double down on retail media and look at how to stand out in the market with what it offers, if not the scale of Walmart et al.
With this in mind, Albertsons has positioned its retail media play as something of a next generation network. Calling it Albertsons Media Collective shines a light on what it believes makes it stand out, the ‘collective’ referring to how it as a retailer works collectively with brands and consumers to bring the best value to all.
In 2023 it became the first advertiser to use a Pinterest advertising measurement feature where Pinterest and Albertsons could upload first-party data in a non-identifiable way. Albertsons since worked with Mondelez on a Pinterest campaign that generated a 16% sales lift through a campaign around salty snacks.
The retailer also collaborates with tech players in an effort to offer a better retail media experience across the value chain. It has partnerships with companies such as Criteo, CapGemini and The Trade Desk that is uses to enhance its media planning, campaign execution and, above all measurement.
Albertsons has become quite focussed on measurement. In Summer 2024, Albertsons launched Collective TV, for brands to target, measure and optimize campaigns across streaming, digital video and linear TV. Then, in January 2025, it rolled out an API that enables advertisers to integrate Albertsons’ campaign performance data into their own measurement models for analysis.
This collaborative approach to measurement – allowing advertisers to plug the performance data into their own systems direct from the retail media network offers an interesting new take of trying to make retail media more measurable and its performance easier to understand.
Complementing these efforts, Albertsons also teamed up with TransUnion to offer its advertisers the latter’s TruAudience marketing mix modelling (MMM) measurement to unlock ease and efficiency in comparing performance across retailers and channels.
According to research from eMarketer, MMM is starting to be seen as one of the most promising measurement types for identifying drivers of business value, with 61.3% of US marketers aiming to improve their MMM in the future. And with increased privacy regulations, there is diminishing ability to match impression data to sales data at an individual level at scale – such as matching consumers who saw an ad then purchased products promoted by the ad within a set attribution window.
Helping advertisers better understand performance related to business value, Albertsons Media Collective is hoping that this collaboration that provides campaign data to TransUnion’s TruAudience solution, will further a brand’s MMM capabilities to better measure media campaign effectiveness overall.
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