Dollar General Is Quietly Building an Ad Powerhouse | Fast Five Shorts

Dollar General, in partnership with Trade Desk and retail media infrastructure provider Kevl has announced a first of its kind solution that unifies its on site and off site ad inventory process, allowing brand advertisers to plan, activate and measure campaigns across the full consumer journey inside a single connected framework.

For the very first time according to chainstore age, DG Media network advertisers can execute full funnel strategies such as spanning connected tv, digital audio and on site retail display and video, all with consistent reporting and measurement in one place.

Testing with managed service Campaigns begins in June 2026 with the full integration expected to be available to Mutual clients in Q3 of this year.

All right Catherine, this is also the put you on the spot question from the A and M consumer and retail group.

I was hoping they would ask you if they would use this headline to put you on the spot this week and it turns out that they did.

So Catherine, as someone who ran a retail media network, what makes this UN approach that Dollar General is touting so hard to execute?

And do you believe this is a game changing unlock?

This is exciting to me Chris.

You know Dollar General Network has been all over the news the last couple weeks.

I think it's exciting.

There's a couple things top of mind for me.

One is every network out there right now knows that they have to go get the incremental brand or national marketing dollars, the trade dollar shopper marketing dollars.

They're tapped out.

If you go any deeper, the retailer itself could start losing leverage of cost of goods.

So they know that there's another bucket of money out there.

That being said, if you're going to get those dollars you have to have a full funnel offering.

And I think it is brilliant tying in the off site, higher in the funnel with the on site.

Now what I'm even more excited about is the in store.

Go figure that, right?

With their, their new partnership with Cusack, who you know we are strategic partners with them at Barrows connected Store.

Huge fan of Cus and so knowing that they're able to take off site, on site and in store and connect it, what that's going to do is it's going to make it a lot easier now for media buyers and for hold code companies to go in and run campaigns.

I think the fact that it's all going to be unified through the media buying, through trafficking and through the reporting is great.

Once it's unlocked for self serve for these brands and these media agencies, I think it's gonna be an absolute game changer.

Is this difficult to do.

You know, I'm a retail media expert.

I have never claimed to be an expert on the tech side.

I know enough to make myself dangerous.

That being said, I do know there's a lot of piping that had to be done behind the scenes on this to get the trade desk, you know, piped in with Kevl and then the brand's first party data to build the audiences and then in store and the acoustic platform, the.

There was certainly a lot of different architecture work that had to be done.

So I'm excited to see the results after they start running water through those pipes and seeing how the performance looks.

So, Catherine, I'm curious, is there anything that, say, if you were to sit atop the chairs of which you sat previously in your career back heading up retail media, is there anything that would be on your rate that you would want to keep on your radar screen Monday morning to make sure that this was working correctly?

What would be your kind of dials you'd be watching, so to speak, to make sure that everything was on the rails with this type of initiative?

Yeah, I would.

I'd be telling my team to go in and double check the campaigns, make sure they're live, check the pacing of the campaigns, make sure you're delivering on the CPMs that you promised the advertiser.

I would be then doing a revenue check to make sure that the attribution is connecting between purchases online and purchases in store.

Um, I'd be double checking that the creative came to life across all these different platforms in a unified way.

Um, so those are some of the things that I would be telling my team to go in and just make sure, as we're in this pilot, because now is the time something will break.

It always does during a pilot.

Right.

So now's the time to catch these things.

So good.

So good.

Okay, so let me ask you another question, and this is something I was thinking about in preparation.

Like, you know, retail media, I think, I feel like we talk about retail media in a vacuum like that, that it's applicable the same way to every retailer.

But all retailers margin structures are different, and particularly Dollar Generals is different too.

When you have a different margin structure of your business, does that impact your retail media strategy in any certain way?

How do you think about that question, Katherine?

Yes and no.

So I think the network that I was part of launching for Dick Sporting Goods could not have been structurally different than the network that I did for a grocery retailer.

And I do think, you know, with grocery margins.

Right.

We all know that they are much more compressed than specialty retail.

I do think that, you know, when you build your network out, you do want to really make sure that you can focus on high margin ad products, which would be anything on your owned and operated platforms before you go off site.

And I think Dollar General has done a really great job at that.

They've had a solid on site platform, they've had solid sponsored product ads.

They're now starting to go in store and they're poised, with their national scale and the size of their audience, they're poised to go get these national brand dollars.

But this is why now I think they're starting to be more efficient and going off site as well.

Wow.

And does it, does, does the price points that you offer impact anything as well, in addition to the underlying margin?

Price points on what?

On the products that you're advertising via the media network?

I think it could, I think like really lower priced products probably tend to do better on site with something like sponsored product ads.

You know, if you're at specialty retail and you're doing, I don't know, a campaign for a new $800 set of golf clubs and it's a new launch and you're going awareness, you know, I think that's something you could do really well on CTV or social media and something higher up in the funnel.

So I do think the price of the item certainly could, could change your strategy.

Okay, all right, good.

These are questions I've always had, but I've never had the chance to ask them of anyone live as we're talking.

So thank you for, thank you for answering them, Chris.

Yeah, that's right.

That's one of the things you're here for and to put me in my place too.

I think that's the other thing that we're discovering too.