Kroger Precision Marketing and Kellanova Share How To Drive Incremental Growth Through Advanced Audience Targeting
Written By: Chris Caesar
The word “incrementality” shows up in almost every retail media report. But without a clear baseline for organic growth, it’s hard to tell if a campaign actually delivered new value, or simply captured sales that would have happened anyway.
And that information gap can lead to some pretty significant consequences: It shapes where brands invest in audience targeting, how performance is judged, and which retailer partnerships rise to the top.
Without a disciplined, shared definition of incrementality, you can spend millions chasing results that look impressive on paper, but don’t actually reflect real growth or success.
At the 2025 Digital Shelf Summit, Jenny Holleran, vice president of Kroger Precision Marketing, and TJ Hanel, director of omnicommerce retail media network national retailer media strategy at Kellanova, walked through their brand and retailer collaboration during their session, “The Pursuit of Incrementality: How Precision Audiences and Measurement Grow Brands.”
Explore a baseline-first measurement framework, shared definitions of incrementality, and a scorecard that makes results comparable and actionable across retail media networks.
Define Incrementality Clearly and Consistently
Holleran and Hanel were clear: Your first step toward judging retail media fairly is establishing a baseline — that is, what sales would have looked like without media spend.
From there, they measure incremental lift against that figure to decide how channels should work together and what to scale.
“Once we have that baseline, then we're able to start measuring all of the channels,” Holleran says. “How did they perform individually? And then most importantly, how did they perform together? Then, you can start to optimize your channel mix.”
Kroger and Kellanova have been testing this approach in practice — building shared baselines, agreeing on definitions, and running joint reviews that both sides can use to scale what works while adjusting what doesn’t for audience targeting.
Keep the Score on Retail Media Networks
Kellanova and Kroger’s next step was to put their baseline framework into practice. In fall 2024, they piloted a retail media network scorecard to evaluate partners side by side on criteria like attribution quality, key performance indicator alignment, optimization levers, and overall business impact.
The scorecard was built to spark progress, not defensiveness. Hanel noted that they even softened the design — changing from traffic-light colors to light blue, yellow, and green — so networks would view it as a growth tool instead of a warning sign.
For Holleran, the scorecard is a loop, not a one-off grade. The process builds in follow-ups, accountability, and next steps that are agreed upon by both parties. By 2025, those reviews were already surfacing capability gaps and generating concrete roadmaps — evidence that the framework was working as intended.
The takeaway? When industry standards fall short, build your own and design it for collaboration. Done well, a scorecard can become a roadmap that both sides can act on with confidence.
Act With (About) 85% Confidence
Waiting for the “perfect” dataset can often be the enemy of the good, especially in a fast-paced market like Kroger and Kellanova’s.
“I really want to prioritize getting to a confident, speedy decision that we feel comfortable in, [rather than] getting to ‘perfect,’” Hanel says.
Holleran says that if the choice is between 100% accuracy or 85% accuracy delivered 12 weeks faster, they’re more likely to opt for the quicker read. “We feel pretty good about taking that risk,” he says.
Of course, working with speed doesn’t necessarily mean skipping accountability. Both speakers emphasized post-mortems and cross-functional readouts: What did we learn? What are we going to do now?
These help to either amplify what’s working or address what isn’t.
Eighty to 90% confidence is “where we’re gonna get value and really start to drive optimization,” Hanel says.
Audience Targeting: Take a Strategic Approach Beyond Your Most Loyal Shoppers
Not every brand grows the same way. For household names like Cheez-It or Pringles, chasing new buyers may not deliver much incremental lift. In those cases, Kellanova often finds more value in buy-rate strategies like encouraging bigger baskets, larger packs, or more frequent trips.
But when the goal is to expand into new households, consistency is key. Too often, brands target broadly at the awareness stage and then shift to different segments at conversion.
Holleran argued the better approach is to take the same audience identified through retailer data and use it across every stage of the funnel. This ensures that the shoppers you want to target see your message in CTV and display, as well as in retail media placements at the point of purchase.
Discipline matters too. Hanel explained that before committing spend to any new tactic, the team checks that it’s measurable, that it doesn’t duplicate existing buys, and that it meets standard brand-safety requirements like viewability and frequency controls.
“If there’s no measurement, there’s probably no dollars,” Holleran says. “If there’s no data behind it … that’s a hard stop.”
Growth Takes a Shared Playbook
Kroger and Kellanova’s message was straightforward, but critical: retail media can’t just look good on paper. Real growth requires a clear baseline, transparent scorecards, and faster decisions made with enough confidence to act.
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LEARN MOREWritten by: Chris Caesar
Chris Caesar (he/him) is a professional writer with two decades of experience working with national publications, as well as top software-as-a-service (SaaS) and technology brands. He is passionate about crafting high-quality, lead-generating content that drives awareness and action.
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