Denver-based Ibotta powers cash-back rewards for companies including Albertsons, Dollar General, H-E-B, Instacart, Kroger, Schnuck Markets, Sprouts, Walmart and many others. Shoppers download the app and can get rewards by scanning a receipt or linking their store loyalty account to the app to earn points.
To date, 50 million people have downloaded the app and registered for an Ibotta account, “and we’ve given away over $2 billion to those folks,” Bryan Leach, founder and CEO of Ibotta, told The Shelby Report’s Jan Meade in a follow-up interview after Leach’s breakout session at Groceryshop 2024 in Las Vegas this fall.
More recently, Ibotta has built out a digital promotions network that powers loyalty programs for companies such as Dollar General, Family Dollar, Schnucks, Walmart and, most recently, Instacart.
“All of the item-level offers that you want to run, you can run across all 1,500 sub-retailers within Instacart, whether that’s Costco or Publix or Kroger or [other retailer]. That’s exciting, because that’s reaching that tech-savvy, younger online shopper,” said Leach, adding that Ibotta now can reach 98 percent of U.S. households with its network of retailers.
Digital shelf tags
One element in the promotions network is digital shelf tags. It was big news when Walmart recently announced it would roll out the tags in 4,600 stores over the next several years, said Leach, noting that less than 1 percent of retailers worldwide currently have them. Electronics retailer Best Buy is an early adopter, as is St. Louis, Missouri-based grocer Schnucks Markets.
“Up to this point, the main value proposition of these digital shelf tags has been operational efficiency – restocking, picking and price updates are much more cost effective. But the argument I want to put to you … is that there are actually a lot of really interesting consumer applications as well.”
Shoppers who have the Schnucks app, for instance, can be alerted when there is a digital coupon available for a product when they are in the aisle. The digital shelf tag pings the alert, and the shopper can scan the QR code on the tag to automatically clip the coupon or get other rewards for purchase.
“It allows you to instantly pull out your phone and engage with that offer without having to have known about it before you were in the store. That’s live today at 115 Schnucks locations,” Leach said. “If I asked you what’s the most technologically forward grocer in the United States, near the top of your list would have to be Schnucks.”
He added that Caper Carts, smart carts that are in use at Schnucks, show Ibotta offers on their screens.
Some tags also offer geolocation capabilities. Vusion digital shelf labels, the brand used by Walmart, have “Bluetooth capabilities that allow you to know exactly where that consumer is” in the store.
In the future, a shopper could start down an aisle and their phone, tablet or smart cart could “pop up a screen and say, ‘Hey, here are four products you might want to consider buying.’ This generates a lot of incremental sales of products,” Leach said.
“Why would consumers want to open an app or stare at a screen in a store just to be bombarded with advertisements? Part of what we believe is the key is giving them something of value in connection with their consumption of that media.”
[RELATED: More Grocers Adopting Instacart’s Carrot Tags, Elevating In-Store Experience]
Ad targeting via AI
One of the myriad uses of artificial intelligence is to decide what product offers to give a certain person at a given time, according to Leach.
“Our industry has gone from one size fits all to … setting up rules like past buyers get 50 cents back, new to category get $1 and switchers get $2. That idea of actually being able to see in real time a cost-per-incremental-unit move does not exist in television, radio, connected television, out-of-home brand ambassadors,” Leach said.
With AI, retailers and brand marketers have to relinquish control and “trust that machines and computers can do that in real time, much more quickly, with all the signals,” he said. “That then allows you to basically solve for a simple question, which is, how inexpensively can I get Consumer X to change her behavior if she’s already buying 2.2 of my product a month?
“We’re moving toward more and more and more computing power to be able to perform these calculations very rapidly, even down to the point that one day, based on what you’ve just put into your cart, your Caper Cart could determine what offer you get.”
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