One of Germany’s largest grocery chains starts marketing it’s more than 3,500 screen instore retail media network centrally. Edeka stores are operated by independent retailers and DooH and instore retail media networks are operated by regional media owners.
Edeka has announced that a new, national in-store retail media network was launched on January 1, 2025; it includes more than 3,500 screens in around 2,000 Edeka stores and is also available for non-endemic campaigns.
As part of the new network, Edeka offers central access to its own and external advertising inventories. These include, for example, the display networks of Edeka Nord and third-party providers.
Edeka did not explicitly name the latter. The group of media owners with networks in Edeka stores includes Viewento, Cittadino and Digooh – which just announced a major roll-out of market entrance screens at the end of 2024.
First party driving retail media
According to Edeka, a central component of the new combined retail media portfolio is first party data and campaign measurement. Advertising customers should receive comprehensive reports and detailed measurement of campaign success based on sales data from Edeka stores.
In addition, for example, targeted couponing measures can be used in parallel with the in-store campaigns and other sales-activating measures from the existing national Edeka advertising portfolio can be added. Edeka just joined Germany’s largest independent loyalty programme Payback, which also provide access to high-performance measures.
Edeka plans to further expand the retail media network in the future.
invidis commentary by Florian Rotberg
Edeka’s announcement that it will centrally coordinate retail media marketing fits in with the retail media boom. The in-store retail media networks operated and marketed by different regional partners are also marketed centrally by EDEKA itself. The complicated ownership structure at EDEKA – the supermarket chain is not a central corporation but historically a purchasing group of independent merchants – has not yet allowed central DooH and retail media sales.
Individual EDEKA regional companies work with different DooH partners. The screen networks run on different CMS platforms and there is no uniform structure for hardware and display orientation. With APIs to the most important programmatic platforms in place, however, the technical challenges can now be overcome more easily.
However, the boom in retail media and competitive pressure obviously require coordinated marketing in addition to the marketing initiatives of the individual network operators.
In particular, a central first-party user data management for target group-specific distribution of retail media campaigns – endemic and non-endemic – can be organized centrally.
