Advertisers Gain Real-Time Customizable Audiences and Always-On Measurement with Instacart and The Trade Desk

Expanded Partnership Helps Advertisers Unlock Closed-Loop Measurement on the Open Internet with Seamless Access to Instacart Retail Data, In-Flight Optimization

SAN FRANCISCO, June 10, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Instacart (NASDAQ:CART), the leading grocery technology company in North America, today announced an expanded partnership with The Trade Desk (NASDAQ:TTD), a global advertising technology leader, to improve programmatic campaign performance on the open internet with retail media data. Instacart is the first U.S. retail media network to integrate its grocery selection with The Trade Desk platform for streamlined self-service use cases, enabling approved advertisers and agencies to build first-party custom audiences based on specific product criteria for programmatic campaigns. CPG brands can also access real-time sales measurement signals from Instacart directly in The Trade Desk platform.

In doing so, Instacart and The Trade Desk are making it easier than ever for advertisers to leverage retail media data to understand and optimize the impact of campaign spend on the open internet and actual consumer action. 

Advertisers have historically had access to high-value, purchase-based audience segments from Instacart in The Trade Desk platform to efficiently reach the right consumer where they are, across channels like CTV, audio, video, and display. Now, approved brands can seamlessly build self-serve, custom Instacart audiences and place them into new and existing campaigns mid-flight, or add ready-made segments from Instacart across alcohol, beauty & personal care products, beverages, healthy products, and snacks, among others. This self-serve functionality eliminates the need for insertion orders (IOs), while benefiting from established features of The Trade Desk's Kokai platform, such as frequency caps, brand safety controls, data privacy compliance, and direct publisher pricing, preserving the control and experience media buyers expect from The Trade Desk.

Advertisers can now more easily measure how Instacart audience segments drive real business outcomes. Partners like Omnicom's Flywheel, leveraging data from Instacart in their campaigns, can access closed-loop measurement from Instacart across all of their campaigns, including attributed sales and return on ad spend (ROAS), directly within The Trade Desk platform. This new visibility enables media teams to see their downstream impact and allows for real-time optimization and enhanced performance across their omnichannel campaigns.

"With this partnership expansion, we're making it even easier for advertisers to integrate valuable Instacart purchase signals into their media buys," said Ali Miller, Vice President of Ads Product, at Instacart. "We've been excited to see how brands have already used Instacart data in The Trade Desk platform to drive incremental reach and new-to-brand purchases. We're now taking this a step further to make audience creation and closed-loop measurement truly seamless. Brands can now move faster to drive valuable results connected to actual sales with precision and scale."

"Instacart is setting the standard for how retail media data can be activated at scale," said Jeff Daniel, GM of Retail Data Partnerships, The Trade Desk. "By integrating Instacart's deterministic purchase-based data and closed-loop measurement directly into our Kokai platform, we're empowering advertisers to drive real business outcomes with precision, speed, and transparency – all while maintaining control over their media investments. This is a powerful example of how close collaboration and technology integrations embrace the open internet to unlock smarter, more precise advertising.

"We jumped at the opportunity to test out the Conversion API between Instacart and The Trade Desk because we knew it would help answer two critical questions we get from brands regularly; is my offsite media working, and can I make it work harder?" said Drew Habeck, SVP, Media, Flywheel. "The ability to leverage Instacart data across offsite inventory via The Trade Desk allows Flywheel to manage and optimize campaigns more efficiently and be more tailored with our audience strategy. On top of that, the closed-loop reporting provides clear sales impact, helping our clients inform their media investment decisions with a greater degree of confidence."

"Danone leveraged the Instacart beta with The Trade Desk to optimize Silk's "Feel Planty Good" OLV campaign assets in real time," said Jennifer Madison, Senior Manager, Plant-Based Media, Danone. "The new functionality from Instacart has made it easier to optimize Silk's offsite retail audience-powered activation, and provide closed-loop measurement."

This new collaboration is the latest addition to Instacart's growing advertising ecosystem, which brings its retail media data and closed-loop measurement to the places where people spend time and make shopping decisions. That includes the Instacart Marketplace, 220+ grocery e-commerce sites, in-store Caper Carts, and off-platform collaborations with partners like Google, Meta, NBCUniversal, Roku, The Trade Desk, and others.

With over 7,000 active brands and 1,800 retail partners, Instacart is helping marketers cut through fragmentation and complexity. Rather than build bespoke strategies across fragmented retail networks, advertisers can tap into Instacart's retail media data where they're already buying media—bringing consistent, high-intent targeting to platforms like streaming, search, and social discovery.

About Instacart

Instacart, the leading grocery technology company in North America, works with grocers and retailers to transform how people shop. The company partners with more than 1,800 national, regional, and local retail banners to facilitate online shopping, delivery and pickup services from nearly 100,000 stores across North America on the Instacart Marketplace. Instacart makes it possible for millions of people to get the groceries they need from the retailers they love, and for approximately 600,000 Instacart shoppers to earn by picking, packing and delivering orders on their own flexible schedule. The Instacart Platform offers retailers a suite of enterprise-grade technology products and services to power their e-commerce experiences, fulfill orders, digitize brick-and-mortar stores, provide advertising services, and glean insights. With Instacart Ads, thousands of CPG brands – from category leaders to emerging brands – partner with the company to connect directly with consumers online, right at the point of purchase. With Instacart Health, the company is providing tools to increase nutrition security, make healthy choices easier for consumers, and expand the role that food can play in improving health outcomes. For more information, visit www.instacart.com/company, and to start shopping, visit www.instacart.com. Maplebear Inc. is the registered corporate name of Instacart.

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SOURCE Instacart