Sainsbury’s loyalty business Nectar360 is to launch a generative AI powered platform – Nectar360 Pollen – which will “redefine how the retail media sector works day-to-day”.
Built in-house by Sainsbury’s and Nectar360 and co-created with partner brands and agencies, the proprietary platform is due to launch in late 2025.
Pollen brings together audience insights, media planning and activation, and measurement into a single platform, making it easier to run closed-loop retail media campaigns, Nectar360 said.
It will be “the most advanced platform of its kind in the UK” Amir Rasekh, managing director at Nectar360 told The Grocer.
“We think there is a much better way to do retail media. The growth projections and the buzz around retail media over the last three to five years is really encouraging to see, but the reality is that growth comes with some growing pains, particularly for clients.”
Pollen would allow brands and agencies to easily navigate the potential of retail media, create omnichannel experiences, and deliver enhanced measurement, Rasekh said.
Generative AI will help brands and agencies “optimise their campaign creative in the moment”, and build “hyper-relevant audiences” and plan media spend. A “multi-touch attribution model and visualisation tool” within the platform will also allow tracking and analysis of all media touchpoints, showing the impact of each channel on overall campaign performance.
“The market is at an inflection point because client expectations are really high,” Raesekh said. “They’ve seen the performance of retail media. They want to understand incrementality of retail media, they want mid and upper funnel performance and capabilities and full funnel capabilities, which we’ve brought into one single tech platform.
“They want more insights. Really importantly, and right at the crux of why we built Nectar360Pollen, they want ease of use,” Rasekh added.
The launch of Pollen would also improve the expeirence for shoppers in across Sainsbury’s and Argos, who would get much more relevant activations and better personalisation when shopping in store and online.
Unilever is among the early test group brands for the new platform, something Charlotte Murphy, head of digital retail media at Unilever UK, said “has been incredibly valuable”.
“What sets this platform apart is how genuinely user-first it is,” she added. “It seamlessly brings together all Nectar360’s media capabilities in one place and gives marketers the tools they’ve been asking for: simplicity, speed and smarter decision-making. It’s a real step change for how we plan and activate retail media.”
Pollen was “redefining what’s possible in retail media” said Harriet Perry, chief media & partnerships officer at OMG UK. The platform was “enabling us to unlock powerful insights, understand shopper behaviour across the entire customer journey, plan, book and measure campaigns in a unified, easy-to-use omnichannel platform. It will pioneer a new approach in media planning and measurement, allowing us to meaningfully move the needle for our clients,” she added.
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