Instacart Advertising with Josh Rider

Announcer

Welcome to another episode of the CPG Guys podcast, our co-host Sri Rajagopalan and Peter V.S. Bond explore how brands and retailers engage with consumers online, in-store and everywhere in between. And now here are Sri and Peter.

PVSB

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the CPG Guys podcast. I'm one of those aforementioned CPG Guys. My name is Peter V.S. Bond. I'm also the vice president of Retail Strategy at PowerReviews. And as always, I'm joined by my co-host. He's an ecommerce luminary. He is an entrepreneur. He is the Cheech to my Chong, the Wayne to my Garth, the Mulder to my Scully. And like Charo, Prince and Sade, we know him by only one name. Please join me in welcoming my co-host. Sri.  Sri. How are you doing today?

Sri

Far too kind. He missed and the Yankees to his Dodgers. But it has been an awesome day and today is especially awesome because I believe in episode twenty six we have our first retail retail partner guest and I'll wait for you to introduce him and welcome him on board. But welcome.

PVSB

Thanks. And before we get to that, I want to remind all of our listeners that to find our content, be it podcast on fifteen plus platforms, the links to our YouTube video, even a list of our favorite podcasts which we listen to, just go to CPGguys.com. And if you like what you're hearing, what would really help us is if you went to the Apple podcast store and you gave us a rating. So go to http://tinyurl.com/appleCPGpodcast And you can do it there. We'd really appreciate it. And we always love any feedback you give us on our LinkedIn page, email, Twitter, Instagram, whatever. We listen to it all and we greatly appreciate it. Let's get to the meat of our conversation today. For those of you watching on video, you'll see I'm wearing a T-shirt which combines two of my favorite things: Instacart and star ratings. So why not actually have some from Instacart on the show? Our guest today is head of brand partnerships for Instacart. I've known him for a little under five years and he has some great experience. He has some consulting experience. He worked at a big alcohol retailer. He worked at data insights provider and now as head of Brand Partnership, he's going to help us understand what it is about Instacart that's going on, makes it so special, and particularly during this pandemic era, why they've been such a critically important component of the lives of people being able to get through this pandemic. So please join me in welcoming Josh Rider. Josh, how are you doing?

Josh

I'm doing great, Peter. Thanks, Peter. Thanks for it. Really a pleasure to be here today and talk to you and your audience.

PVSB

Excellent. You know, hardly a day goes by, Josh, that I'm not seeing your company in the news, the announcement that you were going into business with Walmart in four markets. And then just yesterday, I saw the CEO of 7-Eleven announcing on LinkedIn that consumers could now order products from their stores through your your marketplace platform. So really exciting. I know we'll get into that. But just at a top level, would you mind sharing with our audience a little bit about what Instacart is? I think most people are generally familiar, but describing what the marketplace is and really what your role is in the ecosystem.

Josh

Yeah, happy to do that, Peter. So Instacart is the leading grocery delivery service in North America, and we consider ourselves a marketplace. And in that marketplace, we allow for retailers over 400 in total to enter the delivery space with little infrastructure costs on their side, little CapEx investment on their side, and can be in the delivery market space within a matter of weeks. We are live in all 50 states and Canada and I can share some details about about the breadth of our portfolio here in a few moments. On the brand partnership side, the team that I work with, we are charged with helping brands have a relationship with the consumers on our marketplace. And we do that through a variety of ways. But predominantly we do it through tools where brands can advertise to consumers on our site. And in that capacity, I have the opportunity to work with leading and emerging brands, great brands like Unilever and Procter & Gamble and also emerging brands as well, and have the opportunity to work with them, with our sales team, our account managers, our product and engineering team, our data science team as well, to help educate brands on what is happening in the e-commerce space and then give them the tools to actually generate and shape the consumer's perception of their brands on Instacart.

PVSB

That's. Terrific, thank you, Josh, I'll tell you, when Sri and I were sitting down to think about what we wanted to ask you, we had enough questions that would have kept you here for three and a half days. And we thought going into the Labor Day weekend, that was probably not an appropriate request of you. So we really narrowed it down. So let's let's get into the heart of it.

Sri

Maybe just maybe there's a part to once we've got to the holiday season

PVSB

I don't think it will take much for four to twist arms to ask Josh to come back.

Sri

I know you guys are going to have a blockbuster year.

PVSB

Yeah, it's going to be a big year. All right. So let's get into it. Let's get to the heart of the issue of the times we're in. Right. The pandemic, it has radically altered shopping habits. It's been very disruptive to consumers across the world. And we've read a lot about how you all have been responding to this incredible new demand. I remember at one point I talked to you, I was talking to you on LinkedIn, and it was all hands on deck at Instacart to make sure that they were able to respond to this. So I guess my question is, would you share with our audience some of the thoughts on how you guys have been so incredibly able to scale with  this massive demand coming your way are happy to share?

Josh

Peter, and first, it's it's really been a focus on the health and safety of our entire community. And when we think about the community, we're talking not just about our consumers and their needs, but our shoppers, our personal shoppers and our employees. It's our first priority and everything that's going on Instacart effectively since March. Our goal is to continue to provide an essential service for for millions of families and to also help and partner with our retailer and CPG partners as well. At the same time, we're creating an immediate, flexible earning opportunity for our hundreds of thousands of people, our personal shoppers across North America. These are extraordinary times and we take our responsibility to our customers, our shoppers and our partners incredibly seriously. And in this context, we see a market uptake in terms of interest on our platform and in Instacart. We've seen customer order volume that has been up by as much as 500 percent year over year over the last several months, and our average basket size has increased by thirty five percent as well, meeting that customer demand has been something we spend a lot of time onand as a result, we're back to our pre covid delivery service levels. Last week, nearly 100 percent of all of our orders were delivered within the same or the next day. And so we're really proud of the results, both our our personal shoppers, our employees, our technical teams have done to make that possible. And to do that, we had to launch several new capabilities across technology, our shoppers and our staff, just a few things.

Josh

We've launched more than 15 products for our consumers and our shoppers as part of our rapid response roadmap to meet the challenging needs of Covid a few of those things. We were the first OnDemand company to introduce leave at my door delivery and we rolled out new delivery options such as fast and flexible and order ahead. And what that does is it improves availability for our customers to ensure that getting the products they need in a safe and timely manner. In addition, we have expanded our Instacart shopper community to meet the increase in consumer demand. Instacart shoppers are independent contractors who pack and deliver groceries for millions of consumers across North America. Prior to Covid, we had roughly two hundred thousand personal shoppers on our platform, and we've scale it to more than 500,000 active shoppers since March to meet that demand. But, of course, it's not just our personal shoppers. It's also our customer service and shopper support team, folks that are helping our customers and our shoppers be successful in their day to day lives. We have scale that team to meet demand as well. We've grown our Instacart Care organization from 1,200 agents in March to 18,000 members who are actively supporting our customers, shoppers and partners today. Those are just a few of the things that we've done to help scale this this immense interest in Instacart over the last few months.

PVSB

Those are some really impressive statistics. Thank you for that Josh, Sri. 

Sri

Welcome aboard. First of all, Josh and this episode will be remiss if I don't give a public hello to Sarah & Nilam from my Frito days back in 2013 when you were just starting up. But I want to congratulate both you and the company for providing, as you mentioned, wage earning opportunities for many, for also moving up in terms of your household penetration, etc., and for doing the right thing at the right time. So congratulations. So as I think through the last few months in the pandemic, shopping habits are obviously evolving and changing at the same time. And a lot of shoppers, consumers, customers, call them what you may, are experiencing e-commerce for the first time, grocery shopping online for the first time, and definitely home delivery for the first time. And you all are there to provide the service for many of them. And many of them will probably be sticky even after the pandemic hopefully subsides, keeping that in mind. Josh, are you able to share with us any data, insights, metrics around household penetration y'all have been able to get to as well as what you share of grocery possibly could be during these times since the pandemic started.

Josh

So I can share a little bit there Sri. And thank you for the kind words as as you and your audience probably know, the U.S. grocery business is massive. It's nearly a trillion dollar market by some measures. Every household is a consumer of grocery in some form or fashion. Prior to March, we saw only about five percent of those groceries were bought online. We at Instacart always had a vision that it would grow to maybe 20 percent by 2025. And we had plans to march along with those kind of aspirations and that it would take time, it would take educating the consumer. But with covid-19 are now seeing rapid adoption and the acceleration has been exponential for us in terms of site traffic, visitors that are coming in, visitors that are adopting and visitors that are retaining. We have more than four hundred different grocery partners in our marketplace, retailers and brands that have been built up over years and decades. These are brands and retailers that people trust. Out of the trillion dollars in groceries sold in the US, more than 60 percent of it is represented by the retail partners on our platform. But it's a very fragmented business, and this is kind of core to our philosophy about the grocery market. These are these are family owned, regional, privately held grocers. There are some national players in there as well. And these are brands that consumers in local markets trust and have trusted for years. These are the grocers that we're helping bring online in a new way. Instacart, we don't believe that there will be one winner take all here in this market. There will not be one delivery or logistics company that's going to displace brands that have been with these families for generations. We do not think there will be one monolithic grocery retail brand across the entire ecommerce space. And that's what what gives Instacart a really unique position we feel in the market. We allow these retailers to come online in a way that they probably can do on their own, in an efficient.

Josh

And so as we bring more of these retailers on and Peter, you mentioned 7-Eleven earlier in the conversation, we get introduced to more consumers and more consumers, then learn about e-commerce delivery through these retailer partnerships and adopt. And so we're very pleased with the results so far. And it's only only due to the great collaboration with our retailers, CPG partners and our personal shoppers.

PVSB

Great. That's very helpful. Josh, so let's shift over to from the statistics around penetration and growth to the actual consumers that are using your your marketplace platform. I come from a data science background. I know you have that in your's as well. So I would be remiss if I didn't ask about what you've started to learn about the makeup of your consumers and the changes in behavior that you're seeing. You kind of alluded to basket sizes and trips. Anything in particular that jumps out at you you'd like to share with our audience?

Josh

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. A few things have changed. And and similarly to the way we don't believe this will be a one winner take all market on the grocery e-commerce space. We actually don't believe it's a one trip take all either. We believe consumers will still have different trip missions. They will still I mean, personally, in my household, like we we spread our grocery dollars around. I'm not one hundred percent dedicated and Instacart, and that's fine. And we believe that will happen as well. But we are seeing the consumer insta cart change their behavior. We're seeing more frequent shoppers from existing customers and a rapid increase of first time customers coming onto the platform. Prior to covid, our customer base was largely female and was largely between the ages of twenty five to forty four, and most of them are heads of household. Roughly 50 percent of our consumers are parents and that was pre-covid and that segment remains. We haven't lost that segment on Instacart. Post-covid though we're seeing some new segments start to emerge onto the platform, which are interesting to see segments like young professionals who might not be head of a household yet, but are starting to think about how can they start getting grocery more into their into their dietary needs and wanting to do it through a delivery and ecommerce fashion. We're also seeing college students who are trying to get their needs met, especially in a world where distant learning is happening more often.

Josh

But they're trying to solve their needs for their their small household. Lastly, we're seeing a new segment emerge among seniors, folks that for safety reasons, might not be able to travel to a grocery store, but want to have their deliveries brought to them, their groceries brought them as well. And so all these new segments have caused us to reexamine how we serve them, how we meet them and what are some of their unique needs. But it's been exciting to see that we've evolved from somewhat of a more core segment around parents and heads of households to these new unique segments as well. But we have seen trip frequency increase. We have seen basket size increase as well. And we're excited to see to that new categories are growing and penetration on our platform. Historically, we were very oriented around fresh. But now, of course, with the focus around cleanliness and hygiene, the center of the store is actually growing quite rapidly in our marketplace. So cleaning supplies, baking goods, as I'm sure everyone has read about, has been very popular as well. And so it's great to see that not only the consumer is evolving, but the consumer's penetration into new categories for them on Instacart has changed as well.

PVSB

I agree with you in terms of there's not going to necessarily be one big winner. You know, I came from dunnhumby, and when we were looking at all of the data from Kroger, we learned very quickly that even among Kroger's most loyal consumers, 43 cents out of every dollar they spent on CPG goods was outside of Kroger. So people are going to go shop where they're going to shop. No one's going to have everything.

Sri

I believe sourdough bread is the single hottest baked goods these days because it's actually made its way to an AT&T television ad, which recycles 30 times a day, I believe. But my personal favorite is Challah bread, what's yours, Josh?

Josh

I'm a sourdough fan myself. I'm not going to I'm not going to name brands because maybe they're listening today.

Sri

But this is only what kind of bread. So, Josh, you said a lot about how you guys are now able to provide a service to college students. You're obviously in new households. You talked about the evolving nature of your relationship with consumers and retailers. Peter And I love the fact that you're providing an opportunity for super regionals and regional grocers who have been anchored, as you mentioned, for years and decades, to continue that growth and be able to reach consumers that really want to shop from which I think is really awesome, which is a unique purpose that exists today in retail shopping. So evolution is the name of the game with all of this. And if you look at in Instacart, a lot has happened in the last six months. You've had spectacular growth. How have you retail and CPG partnership and businesses evolved and expanded specifically in 2020. Like what's going on? 

Josh

Yeah, yeah, so we were founded with the goal to be a chief ally the brick and mortar grocers as their as their shopping preferences, as the consumer shopping preferences change over time. We wanted to be an accelerant for brick and mortar grocers to come into the space. And then similarly, we want to give brands of all sizes the opportunity to talk to consumers on on on Instacart platform. So today Instacart partners with more than four hundred national, regional and local retailers across North America to deliver from more than 30,000 brick and mortar stores across more than 5,500 cities in the US. That's across all 50 states and Canada today. And we've had a great history with our retail partners and we've grown substantially over the last several years. But come March, we saw a rapid uptake of retail partnerships as well. So  since March, we've launched our. Added with nearly 130 retailers and introduced nearly 6,500 new stores, the Instacart Marketplace, and it includes some new verticals, some new partners for us as well. And that includes brands like Vitamin Shoppe, Big Lots, Rite Aid, Staples, Costco in Canada and Walmart as well. in a few markets that Peter mentioned. And as as you mentioned earlier, Peter, we're taping this on on Friday, September 4th. We are really excited to to announce just yesterday a national partnership with 7-Eleven starting. 

Sri

Congratulations.

Josh

Thank you. Thank you very much. We're going to start initially with 750 stores and a few markets, such as Dallas, Miami, Baltimore, my hometown of D.C. and the surrounding areas. And we'll be launching with more than 7,000 7-Eleven stores in the coming months. So to my earlier comment, we want to help the consumer in whatever trip mission she is in. And so whether that is the full basket, the grocery fill up or the impulse purchase where she wants to get a six pack of beer and a few grocery items from 7-Eleven and delivered in maybe even less than an hour, 7-Eleven will offer that to her. So we're really excited to have them on board. So that's that's on the on the retailer breadth side. There's also the services that we provide to our retailers today. So delivery is not our only solution. Pick up as as many retailers as many consumers know, is a growing opportunity and service that we can offer. And we're really excited to provide pickup services for nearly 60 grocery partners nationwide. And that includes retailers like Albertsons, Food Lion, Gelson's, Publix, Schnooks, great regional and national brands that consumers love. And the pickup allows consumers to to get easier access into this e-commerce world. And so we're live in nearly 30 states with pickup. And then, of course, we have alcohol. We believe that consumers want the full basket. And so if they're building a recipe, they're building a meal plan. They want to add a bottle of wine. They want to add some beer to that order as well. And so we continue to expand our ability to deliver alcohol, which for your consumers and your listeners who who work in this space, no, alcohol is a is a complex market. Just from a retail perspective, the complexity expands when you try to deliver it as well. But we're very excited to be able to deliver to our consumers alcohol in 23 states, plus D.C. with nearly one hundred and fifty of our retail partners. So that's on the retailer front. And I'll give you a sense of how that has changed and evolved since since the start of covid. But of course, we have to talk about brands. And Peter, you did a really great job of giving my bio. But I started with brands and my entire experience around thinking about how consumers engage with brands and and and how brands can win in this market. And so Instacart, we've been focused on democratizing the grocery store for our brand partners. We want to offer our brands of all sizes an equal opportunity to to talk to and have a relationship with consumers on our site. We want to create as much access as possible for them, whether they're large or small. And we want to do it in a way that that isn't intrusive to the consumer and it's helpful for the consumer. As she's building her basket and exploring. Today, Instacart delivers advertising services for over 700 brands and includes all of the top 25 CPG companies in the US today by size. So we've seen a rapid uptake and interest from CPGs. And happy to talk a little bit more about what they're seeing. 

PVSB

That's really terrific, you know, gosh, I could probably, given your background in brick and mortar alcohol and what you're dealing with in ecommerce and my knowledge of all the intricacies of the commerce associated with that, we could do a whole other episode, so leave that for the future. I can tell you that one of the things I love most about Instacart: remember the days when we used to go to trade shows back before this whole pandemic. My favorite thing to do was to get on get onto the platform while I'm on the airplane connected to Wi-Fi and have groceries that I wanted delivered to my hotel room because I hated paying the prices and having the the lack of assortment at the at the gift shop in the hotel. And so many people would see me in the lobby meeting them to pick up my groceries and say, why didn't I think of that? What a brilliant idea. So you're a great service. So while this pandemic is going on, you guys decide, hey, let's launch, let's launch something that is right in Sri's favorite topic, which is media. You launched a media platform to help connect those brands with the shoppers that are on your marketplace. How can you tell us how you're positioning with the brands and give a little bit about what this is, what this is structured as?

Josh

Yeah, happy to serve the enhanced Instacart ads platform platform marks the next phase of our growth for the companies advertising business. And it comes as brands are more focused than ever on how to best serve the surge of consumers in the digital space. Brands want to communicate with consumers where purchases are being made, and they want to do it in a way that is targeted and performance based more than ever. And especially given the rapid adoption of grocery e-commerce, the consumer has to be at the center of a brand's marketing strategy. The consumer has more power, more choice and a mobile device than they did in past shopping occasions. So the brands need to make sure that they are their item can stand out on a device when she's shopping across the largest digital grocery catalog in the world. Large brands want a solution with reach. They want their media dollars to address the largest pool of grocery consumers as possible and emerging brands want an intuitive solution with low minimums and easy access so they can get in, get out, get back to their day to day jobs. Instacart offers both the tools to meet those needs. With one campaign, your brand can be seen across all of the 30,000 stores powered by in-store car today with minimal investment requirements. This year, we were really proud to introduce our new self-service platform, which your users and listeners can find at ads.instacart.com. For brands to advertise on Instacart. We have we have continue to add new functionality and capabilities to help our partners meet their goals at Instacart.com, we debuted our self-service apps ordering following a pilot with some key partners, including KraftHeinz, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble and Unilever, among others. The new offering supports self-service campaign management for our flagship product, which is called Feature Product. Feature product brings in advertisers items to the consumer's fingertips when they enter a search or they browse the site with an average of 20 searches per customer order and more than half of all ads-to-cart coming from search Instacart's feature product is the easiest way for a brand to be front and center and considered by a consumer. We continue to offer our other ad tools, which includes display products and savings products like coupons and delivery promotions as a managed partner service solution. And we look forward to adding more of those to ourselves, our platform as well.

Sri

You know, having having been in this space of media and e-commerce for quite a while now across multiple, very large brands, I feel the best solutions are those that have the ability for a consumer or a brand in this case to be able to self serve feed-in variables, to be able to extract metrics and stay on top of the campaign at will as opposed to depending on an agency. So I love the fact already. You know, it's like me to win from day one that it is a self-service platform for the most part. So if you if you look inside the self-service platforms, what are some of the variables and inputs that brands would have flexibility in building campaigns from scratch? Because you obviously now are getting immense or spectacular reach and audience and things of nature, which is how a brand equity growth starts in the first place. And you now part of that role of equity growth. 

Josh

Yeah, happy to give you a peek behind the curtain on what's happening on the self-serve platform, so so on the platform, brands can do a few things. They can establish goals. So what is the goal of this campaign? Is it is it sales growth is new customers? What is that goal? They can set their budgets so they can basically create a wallet to fund any and all of the campaigns that they have. They can set schedules so that they don't have to be there the day that they want to start. They can set the campaign for Thanksgiving right now and then go on vacation and it'll run. And then they can manage their future product bids via a second price auction for all their campaigns across the marketplace. Some of the other features that we're really excited about, it's real time, keyword bidding so advertisers can now target the consumer intent through search by setting a cost per click bid at that search term level for feature products, and that allows them to target and reach consumers directly at point of sale. That's one. Second is their unique budget profiles so an advertiser can choose if they want a campaign to be what we call "always on" and try to maximize as many impressions as they can get, or if they have limited financial resources to spend, they can use a daily spend target. And so we will never spend more than what that target is. And so they can smooth some of the variability that happens when you're a fast growing e-commerce site like Instacart is. We also have accurate attribution. So the advertising directly on Instacart's Marketplace gives brands access to the consumer journey from the search, from the impression to the click to the sale. So all that information they can gain through the self-service portal, and that's kind of the best part about it: it's on demand. Instacart ads, offers brands invaluable insights to their sales and all these conversion metrics to help them better understand how their campaigns are performing. You don't have to wait for a report. Any time somebody on a team wants to look, they can open up a Web browser and see the results of their campaigns.

PVSB

Josh before we got on the podcast recording, I did go to ads.instacart.com, right, to make it. If people didn't hear me, it's ads.instacart.com. And I took a look and some of the some of the verbiage you their use there is pay for performance. Can you give us a little bit more detail on how you define pay for performance?

Josh

Yeah. Happy to Peter and the way I'll do that is I'll contrast the offline world with the advertising platform and just to give a sense of how it changes. So in the offline world, there are typically some some high fixed costs required to get consumer attention and commitments typically have to be made months in advance. I was talking to a founder, CEO of an emerging brand, and she was sharing, you know, I have distribution, but I can't get the end caps or these these advertising channels for four months out. And so I'm kind of locked out. And and that's a frustrating experience for  brands. On Instacart's advertising platform. Your campaigns can be live the same day brand starts in if you like. So there's no minimum to get started. You can fund a campaign with ten dollars. One hundred dollars. A thousand dollars. We're not we're not asking for for a fixed fee for you to start running a campaign in the offline world it's challenging sometimes to understand what's the relationship between the advertising vehicle and the sale. And you and your audience probably have done things like media mix modeling and things of that nature on Instacart's advertising platform. You know how many people saw your ad? You know, how many people engaged with it and you know, whether or not they purchased the item because of the ad. And so it's a very clear line that can be drawn between the ad and the sale. In the offline world. You pay for the advertising vehicle regardless of whether the consumer saw your brand or and purchase it. This ties back to the fixed cost conversation earlier on Instacart, you only pay when the consumer clicks on the ad, right? So there's really no risk until the consumer actually sees your ad and engages with it. Your brand is now the only thing that the consumer sees when they run this, this campaign. And when they run a search, you know, it works. And for me, that defines pay for performance. But beyond all those, I'm really excited to announce in June of this year, we transitioned our future product offering to a second price auction. And I don't want to bore your audience with a lot of auction nuances. And I'm not an economist by trade, but in simple terms, what is a second price auction mean? Simply put, it means you don't need to pay any more than what is necessary to secure an ad. This is huge. Instacart doesn't believe an advertiser should have to guess or how much they need to spend on an ad. Advertisers bid their maximum willingness to pay, and they often end up spending much, much less than that. 

Sri

Second, price auctions, congratulations, you know, again, having worked in e-commerce media for quite a while now, it's been 10 years in the making to hear someone say that. So I think you're now officially put out a challenge to other competitors, because from a brand perspective, especially the smaller startup brands, as you mentioned, but you're doing a great service for by allowing them to be flexible with how much they can invest in the platform and doing second price auctions, which is a big deal to all our listeners. If you do not know what a second price option is, I strongly encourage you to Google it and check it out, because it actually allows or gives the opportunity for very small brands with smaller budgets to not have to predict and not have to put hundreds and thousands of dollars in to be able to be part of the mix in competition. So, again, thank you for serving  performance with purpose. When you go about growing this business model, you know, we talked a little bit about input variables into a campaign and how to structure a campaign from scratch. On the other end of the spectrum, one of the challenges that has existed for a while in the industry is when you run a campaign how to measure it. And instead of doing exactly what you said earlier, which is you a band struggle with the media mix modeling things of that nature to be able to measure the success of a campaign, no matter how big or small, ROAS matters. ROI matters, CPM matters, CVR matters, CCVR matters. So what are kind of these variables one can expect when they run a campaign on instruction ads?

Josh

Yeah, there's actually a lot that you learn even as we're setting up the campaign. So it's all start with that. But once they once they set up a campaign in the self-service portal, they learn a lot even before it runs. They get insight into how strong their bid is through the interface. It tells them, hey, this is a really strong bid or it's it's a weaker bid. And you may not get as many impressions in sales from that. So similar to the second prize auction  Sri, we want to create transparency to the advertiser to know what kind of performance they should expect. So we signal to the user on the self-serve portal whether the bit of strong we make recommendations on the bid, the advertiser can choose to follow them or not. So we're educating them as they're engaging with the tool. Some of the things that they learn after the campaign runs is or as it's running, how many times their ad was viewed, how many times where those impressions received, how often the ad was clicked on, what is what is the cost of the ad. And a metric that you mentioned return on the ad spend or ROAS is something we provide back as well. Beyond that, which are very campaign specific, advertisers can learn what search terms are most popular for their campaign. Advertisers can harvest interesting search terms for their brands and set their bids accordingly. Again, Instacart gives the advertiser insight into a bid recommendation at the search term level and informs them how strong that bid can be. It's actionable information all through an intuitive Web portal.

PVSB

That's terrific, Josh, I love the input. I love the output. I'm very excited to even learn as you evolve this platform. All the different things that you're going to be able to enhance in the future. So really useful. So what do you think sets your platform apart from other retail media solutions that you've seen in the marketplace?

Josh

Yeah, I think there's three things. Peter: Reach, control and Insights. And we've talked about about two of them. But I want to go into little more detail on the third. On reach, as we mentioned, Instacart ads, offers brands of all sizes the opportunity to connect with consumers directly. The point of purchase across four hundred grocery retailers and 30,000 brick and mortar locations. So with one campaign, you can extend to every store where your product is available on Instacart. You do not need to set up separate campaigns by retailer, by platform. So it's one campaign to roll them all, if you will. Second, we talked a little bit about control, but advertisers want to be able to to target their campaigns based upon the consumer intent through search and control, the efficiency of their investment through different budget profiles, either paste or "always on" campaigns., as I mentioned earlier, again, in a second price auction, advertisers using Instacart won't have to pay more than is necessary to win. So that control gives the CFO at your your brand listeners more confidence that the dollars aren't being wasted. But the third area around insights. I would like to go into a little bit more detail. Insights for from our perspective is not just the reporting you get through the portal under campaign performance, which we think we think is powerful. It's also about understanding how a brand's business is performing overall on Instacart. This year we launched the Instacart Customer Intelligence Platform or ICIP, as we like to call it, ICIP is a managed service offering where we share insights through reports and direct consulting regarding how consumers are engaging with the brand's products on Instacart, beyond the advertising, so we share with advertisers information regarding their assortment. How many of your items are available on Instacart today? Distribution. How many store locations is available, whether the item has been in stock or out of stock, velocity category position and share and customer penetration on Instacart. Advertisers can also learn about the lifetime value or LTV of the advertising they perform on Instacart and how many new customers are acquiring. These are things that brand managers want to understand. They want to know am I growing in sales? Am i taking share, I'm meeting new customers. Are these customers high lifetime value for me? These are things that brand marketers care about. They don't care about ROAS they want to know am I winning with consumers? And ICIP allows them to understand that their position on the large e-commerce grocery delivery platform in the US and what we're excited about is the way we're bringing ICIP to market is advertisers can gain access to ICIP through their working media dollars on Instagram. So the more advertisers invest in winning consumers on Instacart, they learn more about what's happening on Instacart, and we believe it creates a more of a flywheel effect of I want to learn more. I want to see ways I can influence the consumer behavior on Instacart.

PVSB

Before Sri goes into the last question, I'll just make a comment that what I love about the fact that a brand can target across retailers also means that Sri and I, you've probably heard on some of our episodes. We talk about these above the line, below the line investments because it is going across so many retailers. That means that in all honesty, budgets can be tapped into to to fund this that are traditionally more above the line. And that means that there are greater opportunities for brands to invest in in reaching customers and learning more about them. And as for the the ICIP product, I'd be a kid in a candy store with that Josh. So I'm really excited for you. That's that's absolutely terrific.

Josh

We're in early days there. But but the feedback from our advertising spend has been really strong and we get a lot of feedback from them in terms of the insights that they want to get from the first party data that we have available to us. And it's been it's been mostly effort of prioritizing, understanding. What do brands want to understand about e-commerce? And like what? What are the facts and insights that they want to drive and how can we make them actionable for for them?

Sri

You know, that said, Peter and I humbly talk about Instacart quite a bit on the show. And our humble message continues to be to all our listeners and audience, especially those that are from brands, that if you're not part of the Instacart ecosystem in some capacity already, whether it's to be a partner, vendor partner or taking advantage of Instacart ads, whatever it might be, the train is moving pretty fast. Get on board as soon as you can.cYou do not want to miss out, which is what my next question and the last question for today for you, Josh, is how has the brand reach in terms of partnering with you guys and brand response to taking advantage of all these plethora of new services opportunities you've described in this episode today?

Josh

Yeah, it's the growth has been tremendous. And it's a testament to the team and the platform. But we've seen a rapid influx of new partners, as well as deeper engagement with our partners as well since since covid. But, you know, just to give you a few numbers. So as of as of August, we have over 700 brands partnering with us with nearly 600 of them joining since the beginning of the year. So it's just been a 2020 has been a rapid growth year for us on the Instacart ads team. As mentioned, these are big and small partners. All the top twenty five, CPGs are on the platform working with us, and we continue to make ways for the emerging brands to work with us as well ads.ibstacart.com. And they're they're deeply engaging with our tools. We've seen as we've launched some of these capabilities that the number of campaign revisions has tripled since prior to launch. So they are engaging with our tools. They are really looking to optimize and target, and we are bringing more features to the market that can help them make those optimising decisions, because as you mentioned earlier, that emerging brands may not have the ability to work with a large media agency and so Instacart need to provide some of those capabilities so that they can execute and optimize their campaigns and outcomes to the feedback we're getting fantastic feedback from our partners on the new features that we need to start exploring. 2020 has been a giant leap forward for us and we're excited about carrying that momentum into 2021. And that could include things like getting new features to market, like targeting new consumer occasions like impulse or adding more rich formats to our site. We definitely think we are not done and look forward to bringing more of these functions and features to our advertiser partners for the rest of this year and into '21.

PVSB

I want to remind our audience that they can subscribe to the audio version of this podcast on 15+ platforms and they can view this in video format on YouTube, plus achieve or rather reach all of the content that we have, be it social media, listing of other favorite podcasts, or get to our LinkedIn page by visiting CPGguys.com And we'd really love it again if you would go to tinyurl.com/applecpgpodcast. Give us a rating. It means a lot to us. Josh this has just been tremendous. I know I speak for Sri when I say you provided an enormous amount of information and you delivered it in a very understandable way. So we're about educating our audience. You certainly did that today. You have an open invitation to come back and talk to us about anything new that's coming up. If you took us up on that, you'd probably be in here every week because you got some great stuff going on. So can you can you remind everybody where they can find more about your ad platform?

Josh

Absolutely. They can go to ads.instacart.com. That's great.

PVSB

Thank you again for joining us. Josh, we really appreciate it. Thank you. Josh Sri as always. Thank you be thank you for being my partner on this journey. I think we we we put out another phenomenal episode today. And I just want to thank you for continuing this forward. It is a lot of fun.

Sri

Thank you as always, Peter. Josh, again, thank you. Have been looking forward to this conversation for a while, so can't wait to put it out there 

PVSB

To our audience, we look forward to joining with you on the next episode of the CPG Guys podcast. GoodBye.