DoorDash and market research firm Circana announced a partnership in early September aimed at giving consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands an independent measure of how their DoorDash ads affect consumers’ purchasing behavior.
Lindsay Pullins is the senior vice president of retail media at Circana.
Lindsay Pullins, senior vice president of Retail Media at Circana, said the partnership comes at a time when advertisers seek neutral validation to ensure return on investments more than ever.
“Brands want to know the incrementality of that because if it was just an action that was existing, they likely wouldn’t have invested in that,” Pullins told Food On Demand. “Another metric that is also popping in incrementality is net new buyers. … Am I actually getting net new buyers to buy my product? Where did they come from? How could I have reached them differently?”
Circana reported that an overlap analysis of people who purchase specific brands showed that 76 percent purchased in-store only, 13 percent purchased on DoorDash only and 10 percent purchased through both channels. Among those who purchased on DoorDash, 56 percent bought exclusively through the platform.
“So you can see where it’s all fragmented,” Pullins said. “But I think the biggest number is—and that’s really valuable to DoorDash and really valuable to the advertising brand—that 56 percent bought exclusively on DoorDash.”
Katie Daleo, DoorDash’s general manager of CPG ads, said the partnership reflects an emphasis on investing in measurement solutions to give brands a clearer picture of their advertising.
“By adding trusted, independent validation from Circana, we are strengthening the value we provide advertisers and helping them further measure what matters most: understanding the DoorDash consumer in the context of total market and contextualizing the impact of their DoorDash investments,” Daleo said in a September 1 release.
Three weeks after the Circana-DoorDash announcement, DoorDash announced the launch of Brand Center, a platform with “capabilities built on top of advertising solutions” that “give brands direct ways to improve how their products show up for consumers, from spotting in-store availability gaps to updating product content.”
DoorDash launched Brand Center September 23.
When asked if Circana’s validation for sponsored listings may extend to restaurant advertising products with DoorDash, Pullins said she felt pretty confident the CPG news was the first of many collaborative initiatives between the companies.
“This model is very applicable to many different verticals; I don’t think it has to be siloed into just CPG,” Pullins said. “I think this is a starting point for the two of us and DoorDash’s business, and it makes sense for ours.”
