Winning Beyond the Dollar General Market

In our relentless pursuit of media built better, the DGMN team consistently broadens measurement capabilities and provides custom solutions to meet the unique needs of our brand partners. As the measurement and reporting leader, I have the privilege of bridging our client facing teams including Sales, Insights and Media Execution & Buying with our Mar-Tech stack teams encompassing marketing engineering, data architecture, data engineering and data science. This organizational structure enables our team to effectively translate all the shifting needs and business questions from our brand partners into media strategies, measurement plans and product roadmaps. These efforts are designed to test clients’ hypotheses and address specific pain points with their businesses.

With a background in consumer research and marketing analytics, my passion lies in connecting customers and CPG brands through the lens of data. My role at DGMN provides a perfect platform to pursuit this passion. At DGMN, we can leverage the knowledge and expertise gained from our 1P data and provide brands with customer-centric media strategies and measurement solutions. In the most recent year, particularly on the measurement front, nearly all retail media networks have been challenged to demonstrate incremental offline impact driven by digital media investment, and the DG Media Network is no exception. At DGMN, both the entire measurement team and I embrace these challenges from our brand partners. Their asks propel the team to continuously evolve measurement approaches and discover creative ways to expand our measurement capabilities.

One of the interesting discoveries we recently unveiled from a custom measurement study is DGMN media can not only help brands promote brand engagement among Dollar General customers within Dollar General stores, but also help extend advertising effectiveness, influencing how Dollar General customers interact with the promoted brands everywhere they shop in the broader rest of market.

Opportunity

One of the nation’s leading brands in beverages and snacks sought support to launch a new product as an extension of an existing brand. DG Media Network was chosen to be part of this launch because of our proven efficacy at reaching hard-to-reach and underserved rural customers. For this collaborative venture, the DGMN team leveraged its media platform to attract customer awareness to the client’s product innovation and acquire new customers via this extension of the existing brand.

The Challenge and Approach

Informed by Dollar General’s first-party customer insights, the DGMN team designed a multi-faceted media plan that included existing brand buyers, category buyers and affinity category buyers as our primary targeting audience. The ad creatives would be delivered via a collection of Dollar General media channels including both displays and videos, and the media would be running for 10 weeks.

As a nation-wide product launch, the brand team was eager to learn how much their investment in Dollar General media could contribute to their overall national business strategy. Most retail media networks could only measure results within their own market zone and data ecosystem due to data privacy regulations and technical limitations, and DGMN was one of them. To overcome this challenge, the DGMN measurement team mapped a creative route – partnering with a leading third-party media measurement provider to quantify media effectiveness for the rest of market and only leverage DG’s best-in-class MarTech stack to measure the Dollar General market.

Results

The outcomes not only validated the hypothesis but exceeded expectations – the campaign effectively reached desired target audiences to driver brand awareness and achieved exceptional in-store sales performance in both Dollar General market and the rest of U.S. market. The campaign delivered media to approximately 3 million unique Dollar General customers, overlapping the brand’s most sought-after segments with an outstanding Viewability Rate of over 85%. Additionally, the sales performance surpassed the team’s expectations for a new product launch campaign in this product category. Both markets saw positive incremental sales or sales lift over the control audience with Dollar General market results being much higher (iROAS $20 and sales lift 7%). Within all converted audiences, the team reported strong ‘New to Brand’ and ‘New to Category’ trial rates in both DG and rest of the market, affirming the success of the brand team’s new product strategy.

Conclusion

This study exemplifies the successful collaboration between the brand partner and the DGMN team. It underscores the DGMN measurement team’s commitment to tailoring our measurement solutions, helping brands achieve business goals, and providing learnings to shape future business strategies. We look forward to more collaboration and more challenges from our future partners!