UK-based Ocado Retail launches Ocado Ads, powered by Zitcha

Ocado Retail, one of the UK’s fastest growing grocers, is marking a new chapter in its retail media journey with the launch of Ocado Ads, in partnership with Australian founded unified retail media platform Zitcha.

Ocado’s online-first operating model will allow Ocado Ads to drive measurable growth for its brand partners, while delivering relevant advertising and a personalised experience for customers, allowing them to find the brands they want and discover new products.

This next step in Ocado’s retail media journey comes as ad spend for the retail media industry is expected to pass £3.2 billion in the UK this year, and is set to almost double by 2027.

Ocado Retail has extensive first-party customer data, enabling brands to target customers at scale based on purchase history and reach a verified audience for advertisers.

Ocado Ads comprises the following elements:

• Full Funnel Retail Media: Onsite and offsite, social media and connected TV advertising
• Ocado Ads Manager: All the tools and features required for managing effective retail media campaigns, powered in partnership with Zitcha
• Ocado Insights & Measurement: Robust insights, analytics, and measurement powered by Beet, Ocado’s self-serve insights platform, with a metrics roadmap aligned to IAB standards for industry-leading accuracy
• Ocado Audiences: Advertisers can target the UK’s fastest-growing grocer’s audiences with new ways to build audiences, and use for targeting offsite
• Ocado Innovation: Advertisers can leverage the Ocado NPD Lab for the fastest NPD in the UK and use A/B testing to optimise creative performance

Ocado Ads offers more than current retail media solutions available to brands and agencies, aiming to be the home of test and learn for grocery advertising across digital retail media in the UK. The launch includes propositions that help advertisers to tap into new ways to test and learn their NPD, and target with new offsite audience extensions.

Troy Townsend

Troy Townsend, Zitcha CEO, said: “It’s exciting to partner with the world’s largest online grocery retailer and help integrate the entire business around its Retail Media Network. For us that means building out cross-functional capability and offering full visibility on the planning and delivery of retail media for the whole business.

“Ocado is spearheading the use of our joint business planning tools and will be the first in EMEA to access Zitcha’s single customer-view platform, where it can manage its network to scale and deliver against its bottom line. By seamlessly integrating, Zitcha can expand current capabilities and unlock new ones. The Ocado partnership illustrates how our platform can empower an existing Retail Media Network to drive growth and maximise performance.”

Jack Johnson, head of Ocado Ads at Ocado Retail said: “Ocado Ads is raising the bar for retail media. We encourage all our suppliers to grow with us and so we’ve created Ocado Ads with a view to providing another growth engine for brands. Ocado has been an innovative and disruptive force in the industry since its creation and we believe this will boost our approach to retail media.”

Johnson explains: “Ocado Ads has a flexible operating model that challenges the one-size-fits-all approach of traditional retail media networks. Whether you’re an advertiser or an agency, you can ‘have it your way’: fully self-serve, completely managed, or anywhere in between.”