For decades, the great mystery of consumer packaged goods marketing has been what happens after the truck leaves the warehouse. A brand could spend millions on television commercials, coupon programs and point-of-sale displays, only to discover — too late — that the product itself was nowhere to be found when the shopper arrived at the shelf.

Now two of the largest players in grocery delivery are promising to solve that problem, or at least make it somewhat less mysterious.

DoorDash introduced what it calls the Brand Center, an advertising dashboard that includes a feature allowing marketers to see, in something approaching real time, where their products are actually in stock at participating retailers. Instacart, not to be outdone, announced its own shelf-monitoring software this week, offering both grocers and consumer packaged goods companies a digital view of inventory levels.

The implications for advertising budgets are considerable. A brand that can see its product is out of stock in Phoenix but fully stocked in Philadelphia might, in theory, redirect its media spending accordingly — a capability that would have seemed like science fiction to the brand managers of the 1990s, who relied largely on Nielsen data, gut instinct and phone calls to regional sales representatives.

(Whether marketers will actually use such tools with the surgical precision their creators imagine, or whether they will simply add another dashboard to the dozen already open on their screens, remains to be seen.)

The announcements also reflect the broader ambitions of delivery platforms to become something more than logistics companies. DoorDash and Instacart have been steadily building advertising businesses, and offering proprietary data that brands cannot get elsewhere is one way to make those businesses stickier.

For the grocery industry, which has spent the last century trying to figure out what is on its own shelves, the software represents a modest technological triumph — even if the fundamental challenge of keeping popular items in stock remains, as it has always been, a matter of trucks, weather and human error.

Original story published in adweek.com: "DoorDash and Instacart Are Giving Brands New Ways to See What’s Actually on Retailers’ Shelves"