Ahold Delhaize USA’s Bobby Watts on the Next Phase of Retail Media | Groceryshop 2026

Hello, everyone.

This is Omni Talk Retail.

I'm Ben Miller, host of Grocertalk, and I'm coming to you live from Las Vegas from the Vuzion podcast studio on booth 913 at Grocery Shop 2026.

And joining me now is Bobby Watts, SVP and executive lead for Ad Retail Media Ajo Delez USA.

Welcome back to Omnitor, Bobby.

Yeah, glad to be here.

Can you give us a quick intro?

What is included within ad retail media?

What banners within the Aho Delez business, for example?

Yeah, so I work for Aholdele's usa and so we have banners such as Hannaford Stop and Shop Giant Food Giant Company, as well as Food Lion.

And may not be obvious with my title, but I also have responsibility over digital merchandising and digital marketing as well.

So as we think about it from a broader customer engagement context.

Fantastic.

And Louis, it's a very special day today.

Congratulations.

Bobby has just been named into the 2026 Path to purchase Institute hall of Fame.

Thank you, Ben.

I appreciate that.

Oh, thank you for giving us your time on such a special day.

So look, come on, Bobby.

I want to hear your perspectives on retail media.

You've been in this game for a while now.

How is it evolving in the U.S. what are the big priorities for retail media from a grocer's perspective?

And.

And let's go on to talk about what you're doing about it.

Yeah, so.

Well, I think there's a.

Obviously folks are talking about agentic commerce.

I had to say it.

It's been talked about everywhere around here today and yesterday as well.

Maybe too much, but I think that's a big topic for folks.

And then what's the next wave of advertising inside of that?

If we're all shopping autonomously with agents and like, what does advertising look like in the future?

So we're having some dialogue about that.

Happy to talk a bit more about that.

But I think what's really getting traction right now is in store.

So as you know, Ben, we're an international company.

So I have counterparts in, you know, the Netherlands and in Belgium and elsewhere across Europe.

And in store has been booming there for years.

And I think the US is now saying, hey, what's the opportunity with us to digitize inside of the store, whether it's through digital screens or other mediums?

And so we have a big project going on right now where we're deploying digital screens across roughly.

We'll have 850 stores this year.

We'll do the other 1200 next year.

So we're really excited about that initiative right now.

Okay, let's come back to agent two Commerce.

Okay, let's go deeper now into in store.

So you're bringing digital screens in.

Tell me a bit about that.

Are they screens you're operating?

Are you controlling the media?

How does, how does the business case for a big bit of capex like that work, Bobby?

Yes, well, you know, it's a great question.

And we took a unique approach comparatively to our competition.

So we, we're doing it all ourselves.

So I love the folks at the other places like Grocery tv, Strata Cash and Barrows, wonderful folks.

But we made the decision to take that on ourselves.

We're partnering with a company called One Diversified to do the deployment.

But we're laying out, as you can imagine, all the capital, as you just said, to make that deployment.

We did a tremendous amount of consumer research and testing before we took that on to understand what was the right location in the store, where was the places that were going to drive the highest level of customer engagement and ultimately the highest return for our partners.

And, and so we picked some places we're going very strategically where we're putting those as an example.

We're putting them at the entry point.

I was an operator, so I talk about store like a racetrack.

When you think about the circle where consumers kind of go around, we're doing two sided there and then the obvious other place where there's a tremendous amount of dwell time is in our pharmacies where we have pharmacy.

And so that's where we're starting.

We do have existing screens already in there like our fresh departments with delis and other places.

And so we're going to put some content there.

But really for us it was like go small, put them in the right places where you have good dwell time or an opportunity to engage with consumers.

Like I think about entry point as an example.

Someone's entering the store.

What a great place to showcase innovation where they might find something in the store they weren't expecting to find.

Okay.

When you're managing a kind of a retail media business as large across as big a portfolio of yours, how did you fall upon in store screens?

That's the one that we're gonna get behind out of all the different options that you've got.

Well, it's not that that's the only thing I think where we were reading the market to say like okay look, if you think about 90% of the sales still happen inside of a brick and mortar store, so you have a tremendous amount of traffic.

You have a captive audience that's there with an intent to shop.

You're missing an opportunity.

Was more of that we said is like, you know, there's an opportunity here to engage.

Let's not miss that opportunity.

We can also enhance the in store experience is what we also believe, because the screens make the store feel more modern.

It's just a nice digital medium that brightens the store.

And the other added benefit, oh, by the way, when like again, we're doing this ourselves so we can control the content that's on those screens, we're using it for private brands, we're using it for our loyalty programs, we're using it for other ways to communicate to consumers around other programs.

Okay, that was what exactly.

The next thing I wanted to ask about you is content.

So it's one thing getting the screens in, the next thing is making sure there is engaging content.

You've already talked about it being additive to the shopping experience.

How are you doing it?

Who's kind of editorially controlling the content?

Well, we do it and we partner with our marketing teams as well.

So as you can imagine, we have five great local brands at Aholdel A's.

I named them off a moment ago.

So everything that we do, we do times five to make sure that the content is showing up in the brand.

Look, tone, feel, copy, creative to match that brand.

So Hannaford's content is different from Stop and Shop's content.

And we're doing that through my marketing team that I have on my team.

So we're managing that content, we're partnering with them on creative guidelines, partnering with our CPG partners to make sure their brands show up in the right context as well.

And then we're deploying that video content.

Okay, so great.

Thank you for bringing up the CPG partners.

Let's talk about that.

Let's.

The advertisers on ZNA Network, in your experience, in the conversations you're having with them at the moment, probably at this fair, what, what are they looking for at the moment?

Is, is it awareness?

Is it conversion and performance?

Is it everything?

Well, I think that you ask anybody.

You know, it's funny, I was at Ascendant last week and we were talking about measurement, measurement standards.

And it's been the dialogue for a long, long time.

What I keep coming back to is like, we already have a standard.

It's market share.

And guess how you win with market share?

You sell more stuff.

And so I think regardless if you're the cpg that's selling laundry, or if you're the cpg, selling edible foods or whatever, or if you're the retailer.

What we're all measuring ourselves against, are we selling more?

Are we driving market share growth against our competition in the beverage space?

If you're blue, you're measuring against red, and if you're red, you're measuring against blue.

And so for me, it's like that's the ultimate metric of success is are we driving market share and that translates into selling more units.

Okay, really interesting, really interesting.

And when you're making that happen, are you making that happen at a brand marketing level or are you making that happen at a sort of shopper marketing level or everything in between?

I think it's.

Well, obviously with us, I would call us a super regional from Ajo Delay's USA standpoint, I think what we've been kind of tapping into thus far is mostly kind of the shopper marketing side.

We're starting to build some relationships with the right folks to tap into that brand side, which then starts to spill into what are the capabilities you have to drive more awareness, more upper funnel conversations.

But I would say mostly on the shopper marketing side to date.

One of the things though that I think is quite interesting is when you think about channels like upper funnel channels like off site media and otherwise.

I think most folks view those as in conflict to the national brand media campaigns they're running.

And what I would say, I would say think about that differently if I was talking to a brand leader and say, you can think about those channels within a retail media network, about how are we using your brands to drive traffic to our app and store?

One of the great examples I've been using more recently is like the print circular is the way we used to drive traffic to our stores.

And the shopping journey is just not that linear any longer.

It's not that simple.

And so I think about things like off site media, more upper funnel channels where brand dollars have mostly been used and say, can you use those channels to actually drive traffic and almost then drive into a lower funnel type of conversion?

Okay, you mentioned agency commerce.

So we're in your seat, the retail media seat.

There's been lots of copy, endless copy written about, you know, agented commerce is going to be the doomsday for retail media.

Disintermediation is ahead of us in the next week.

Well, okay, let's brace ourselves for that.

So come on, Bobby, what are you looking at it?

How are you thinking about it?

What are you actually probably planning for.

At our hotel as first and foremost meet the customer where they are.

So for us, we're building out agentic capabilities within our ad tech platform to help our advertisers, they're the customer on our ad tech platform.

So how are we bringing agentic orchestration agentic tools to make media planning, media activation easier.

Okay.

From a true customer shopping in our stores and our app every single day.

We're also thinking about that for them.

How do we make shopping more seamless for them?

We launched a meal planner to help folks with their meal planning activities.

We have a shopping assistant that we'll be launching next year to just really help folks all the way through all the shopping journey.

At the same time though, what is in the back of my mind is like how do I ensure that I continue to own the customer relationship?

So if you own the customer relationship and that whether they're choosing to shop autonomously through an LLM or if they're shopping on our app or website, that's what'll matter the most.

Because if I think about it through the lens of driving desirability and discoverability through LLMs with a customer, if I'm the shopper or Ben, let's say you're the shopper and you've got an agent that's built around your profile, you're gonna inform that agent what's most meaningful to you.

Whether that's value, quality, freshness or hey, I love Food lion because I shop there every single week.

Please shop there.

And so the agent then is informed, but that stems from your desirability and love and relationship for that brand.

And then we're also talking about the role that loyalty plays because if it's just a price metric and how is the agent just finding the lowest price, that's a race to the bottom.

But I believe loyalty can play a really key role in how you define value to the shopper and what additional perks that you can get.

And then obviously your agents informed of that.

So having machine readable loyalty programs is extremely important.

Okay, can you give me a couple of examples?

I don't know if you're going to be live or something you're working on about loyalty in the age of agentic.

Yeah, so as I just said, so loyalty in the age of agentic is like you think about partnership benefits as an example.

So we or or points programs that we have.

So we have them today.

Some of our brands operate loyalty programs around points and then you earn those points and you can redeem those for free, fuel discounts or other ways and convert it into grocery dollars.

I think in the future what you'll have is you'll have those programs that then allow you to convert those points into other forms of cash or value to the consumer through other partnerships.

But again, conveying that to an agent to say this customer, Ben, in This case is one shop away from earning an additional $10 worth of points or value that can be used elsewhere or even within our retail organization.

The machine being able to pick that up and understand that to saying that we're this close to hitting that trigger is a different than just letting me go find the lowest price for the next box of cereal or whatever.

Really interesting.

Really interesting.

Go Bobby.

This has been fascinating.

Let me get out of here with one final question.

What's the biggest, most exciting development you're looking at for 2027?

So for us, it's with our Edge platform.

So as you know, back on January we launched our own proprietary ad tech stack, Edge.

And so today we power on site display in store digital screens and sponsor product ads through that platform.

We're finishing up some third party integrations as well.

And so what we're starting to bring is a gentic orchestration over that platform to be able to allow a media planner to come in and sit down and build an omnichannel media plan through one single ui, eliminating the legacy need of kind of having channel planners.

And so next year what we hope to do is build on top of that and say, okay, not only can you do media planning inside of an agentic orchestrated tool, but how can you do media activation and then ultimately have an agent autonomously optimize that campaign across channels?

Fascinating, bobby.

That's been 10 minutes of brilliant retail media.

But really appreciate it.

Thank you for joining us.

Thank you for the teams of Fusion and Grocery Shop for making the coverage of this conference possible.

And stay tuned for more.

Thank you, Bobby.

Thank you, Ben.