The Branded Pantry

 Despite distractions from would be acquirers, shareholders and competitors Yahoo is beginning to focus some attention on CPG and CPG/retail.    

In the last few weeks they have:

• Done a deal with Wal*Mart.com to target interested consumers with WM.com products on sale.
• Started to work with some Retail Circular suppliers across the retail spectrum, to peel off circular promoted items and feed them to interested consumers.
• Added 94 newspapers to their consortium of 779 newspapers for content to feed to local consumers.  (in competition with Quadrant One.)

This growing awareness of the importance of CPG and CPG retail is probably  just a dollars based understanding.  It is true that CPG and retail spend significantly on creating brand awareness with consumers.  More importantly to ad vehicles such as Yahoo and Google is that FMCG (the fast moving grocery and GM products rather than electronics, music, apparel, etc.) are products that need to be repurchased, decided on, changed out at least once per week and in general more often.  When it comes to frequency of purchase, number of products purchase on a single occasion and total spent over a year’s time the FMCG industry rocks!   You Mrs. advertising executive want to grab attention, traffic and loyalty??…grab FMCG.

 But! Tain’t easy.  Not online.  Consumers can turn off online commercials and sites, just like they do with TV and newspapers at home.  Build your message into a convenient, contextual application designed for the way folks shop for groceries and you will be amazed at basket size, repeat purchase and WOM-buzz.    Build it the wrong way and you are toast….but toast won’t buy your solution….at least not twice. 

Check out MyWebGrocer for a company who “gets it” and has put together a suite of applications that focus first on how the shopper shops and then on how to deliver the message.  Now, in all fairness I own a piece of the company, but that doesn’t mean that we didn’t work long hours back a couple years ago when I ran it…making sure we got the applications and their interactions right.  Today they have the biggest audience, fastest growing too and an audience that usually LIKES getting the message. 

 There is not question that media will move away from traditional in-home vehicles.  The decline in newspaper subscriptions, readership and advertising has been breathtaking.  It has surprised even the most dour of prognosticators.  Where will all those dollars go?  Two vehicles vying for king/queen-of-the-hill….online and out of home (ie in grocery and other FMCG outlets, in-store).  Who will win?