The shopping stamp, that humble adhesive square that housewives collected during the Depression and redeemed for toasters, has turned out to be one of the more durable innovations in American commerce. Loyalty programs have now survived nine decades of reinvention — from Green Stamps to punch cards to the apps that clutter your phone's home screen — and they may be about to prove their worth again in ways their designers never anticipated.
At the Loyalty Connect conference in Atlanta recently, a gathering of the people who have spent careers building and fixing these programs, the conversation kept circling back to a question that would have seemed odd even two years ago: What happens to retail media when artificial intelligence starts doing the shopping?
The concern is not abstract. When a consumer arrives at a retailer's website having already conducted their product research inside an AI answer engine, they skip the browsing and searching that generate the majority of retail media advertising revenue. The threat to the business model is real.
But here is what does not collapse: the loyalty program.
Christine Foster, group vice president of commercial strategy and operations at Kroger Precision Marketing, made the point concrete in a recent discussion. Kroger's loyalty program, which has been running for more than two decades, connects to 95 percent of all transactions at the grocery chain. "Most retailers cannot, or don't have that level of confidence in their data sets," Ms. Foster said.
That confidence has enabled Kroger Precision Marketing to build an integration with Google linking its audiences inside YouTube and DV360 with measurement that tracks actual retail outcomes — total sales, incremental households, units moved — all the way down to the individual product level.
The pattern repeats across the industry. CVS Media Exchange leans on its ExtraCare program and its 90 million addressable members. Best Buy reports that 93 percent of its transactions tie back to a customer identifier. Albertsons claims 100 million addressable identities powering its Media Collective.
(One might observe that "addressable" has become to retail media what "synergy" was to the merger boom of the 1990s — a word that means something real but gets used so often it starts to feel like an incantation.)
Chris Norton, who built Marriott's Riot Media network, told the Atlanta audience that measurement remains the single most important capability for any loyalty-based media business. Even with 150 million Bonvoy members, advertisers still demand proof. Marriott has had to offer brand lift studies free with every campaign.
Charlie Casey, chief executive of the loyalty platform LoyaltyLion, offered a formulation that the industry seems to be adopting as a kind of mantra: "Technology will change how we buy, but not why we buy."
The emotional reasons a shopper returns to a particular retailer — the sense of status, of belonging, of being recognized — are harder for an AI agent to optimize away than a stack of points. An algorithm can comparison-shop point values across 10 programs in seconds. It cannot replicate what it feels like to be a top-tier member.
Whether that distinction will prove sturdy enough to protect retail media's margins is, of course, the question that will occupy many conference panels to come. For now, the shopping stamp's descendants are being asked to do something their creators never imagined: serve as a moat against the machines.
Original story published in The Drum: "Kiri Masters: Loyalty data is becoming retail media’s strongest defense | The Drum"