Speaking with The Drum at Groceryshop, Adam Silverblatt says retail media’s “too-many-networks” era is ending, with his bet on simpler buying, smarter AI and faster couch-to-cart conversions.
Adam Silverblatt, Instacart
Adam Silverblatt, head of off-platform ad sales and strategy at Instacart, doesn’t mince words about where retail media stands. “We’re going from proliferation to consolidation,” he says. “Brands are working with hundreds of networks and trying to figure out who’s actually adding value. There’s a massive opportunity to simplify.”
Instacart believes it can do what others can’t: connect 1,800 retailers, 100,000 stores and millions of grocery baskets to finally make media and commerce work together. “We sit in a unique spot,” Silverblatt tells The Drum. “We can partner with retailers, support their own commerce businesses and give brands one ecosystem instead of hundreds of fragmented ones.” The goal, he says, is to cut through the noise, prove real lift and make the experience less painful for everyone.
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Retail media exploded so fast that it’s now collapsing under its own weight. “Brands keep asking the same thing: how do we compare all these partners?” Silverblatt says. His answer is to make the experience work like the rest of advertising, with the same tools, same controls and one place to manage it all.
“Buyer simplicity has to be at the core. If you’re buying Pinterest media, it should look and feel the same as buying anything else without jumping through extra hoops.”
Then comes the proof. “We’ve had to show incrementality from day one. We don’t own a store, so every dollar has to show up as real lift beyond what brands already get from their retail partners.” That same data-led approach now powers Instacart’s audience business, helping brands reach the households they’ve been missing elsewhere.
Instacart’s AI story is refreshingly practical. “We want brands to think about strategy and outcomes, not spend all day running the machine. Some of the tooling and solutions we’ve built that are informed by AI take all of that data signal and put it to work.”
Behind the scenes, that means automating the tedious parts of advertising. “We’re focused on making the buying experience simpler and more automated so brands can think more about the outcomes they want to drive instead of spending all their time in the platform.” Universal campaigns allow a brand to plug in an objective and budget and the system determines the right formats and spend. Automated brand and product pages build themselves in minutes.
Optimized bidding then adjusts in real time using live data to stretch budgets further. “It’s one thing to set up a campaign, but it’s another to automate and optimize it in-flight. We’ve seen brands using optimized bidding drive more new-to-brand sales and better consumer experiences.”
For brands like General Mills, Celsius and Rescue Dog Wines, that kind of automation means fewer manual tasks and more time spent on creativity. “When they see the results and how much faster they can move, they’re all in.”
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The dream of “scroll to sale” finally looks tangible, especially in grocery, with Silverblatt saying it’s a moment that’s been years in the making. “The idea of bringing commerce to media has been dreamed about for a long time, but that’s changing and it’s changing fast. We’re the tip of the spear for that.”
Instacart has teamed up with Roku, NBCU, The Trade Desk, Pinterest and Meta to close the loop between seeing an ad and getting what you want delivered before the next episode starts. “Consumers are ready for the immediacy of commerce being real to that media. Imagine watching something on Roku, scanning a QR code, landing on a product page and having it show up at your door within the hour. That’s not the future, it’s happening.”
The secret is inventory awareness. Instacart’s system knows what’s available nearby, so it doesn’t just show a product; it shows what can actually reach you. “We democratize the consumer experience. We’re not forcing anyone to one retailer. It’s all about their location and the inventory awareness we’ve built in.”
Measurement now follows the shopper in real time. Through Instacart’s partnership with The Trade Desk, the Conversion API pushes in-flight purchase data so brands can see how campaigns are performing and optimize mid-run. “When brands look at return on ad spend and in-flight performance, we can show the closed loop of what happened after exposure,” says Silverblatt.
Danone and McCormick have been early adopters, using that system to test new audience segments and boost efficiency. Alcohol partners like Heineken have also leaned in, while a Meta case study with Driscoll’s showed that blending awareness and conversion formats lifted both recall and revenue.
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Silverblatt has spent enough time in CPG to know that “full funnel” has long been marketing’s favorite myth. Until now. “For the first time, retail media data is informing real upper-funnel decisions,” he says. “We can use what people buy to guide what they see and prove it works.”
That shift means CPG brands can use Instacart data on baskets, search trends and new-to-brand behaviors to plan campaigns across CTV, programmatic and social. With shoppable formats layered in, the distance between inspiration and checkout keeps shrinking.
“That’s what excites me most – using commerce data to power media that people actually want to watch and buy from.”
What comes next is more off-platform integration, cleaner buying inside the tools marketers already use and case studies that prove lift, not just clicks. “It comes down to performance and simplicity. Make it easy to buy, prove what it delivered and make sure the consumer experience doesn’t break along the way.”
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