Dive Brief:

• Kroger and Kroger Precision Marketing (KPM) announced an expanded partnership with Pinterest that enables advertisers to leverage the supermarket chain's first-party data for targeting ads on the social platform and closed-loop measurement to track from digital inspiration to purchase, according to a news release.
• Brands will be able to expose customers to new products and connect with Kroger's millions of customers on Pinterest. Kroger captures 96% of all transactions through its loyalty card, data brands can leverage to identify the most effective audience, create seamless connections to commerce and measure sales impact.
• Kroger and Pinterest are expanding a relationship that began last year and included a push aimed at inspiring shoppers to purchase Greek yogurt. The campaign drove a 53% increase in traffic and a 15% lower cost per engagement, according to the release.

Dive Insight:

Pinterest is a destination for many consumers looking for inspiration related to fashion, food and home-related topics. The KPM partnership with Pinterest will give brands the chance to better target these audiences at various stages in their product discovery and purchasing process by leveraging Kroger's consumer data.

Faced with competition from Amazon and its growing ad business, retailers, like Kroger, Walmart and Target, are leveraging their vast amounts of consumer data, including their shopping habits and purchasing history, to attract advertisers with the promise of targeting their most relevant audiences. Kroger hopes to generate $400 million in additional profits by 2020 and sees its marketing unit KPM as playing a key role in that goal, since it places digital ads for companies like Unilever and General Mills, according to Bloomberg.

Pinterest has been rolling out new features to bring more advertisers to the platform and connect with its more than 250 million monthly users — mostly women, but fathers are a growing user group — with 78% saying brands' content on the platform is useful to them, according to data from the company. Pinterest made its content marketing API available to third-party influencer marketing platforms, giving marketers and influencers the ability to collaborate more effectively.

Retailers Macy's, Lowe's and Kohl's embraced the Pinterest Gift Globe experience around the holidays to connect with shoppers on specific product categories. The experience offered personalized gift suggestions when shoppers entered information about what they were looking for and shook their phones, and they could purchase the items.