Uber and Instacart deepen tie-up with advertising integration
This story was originally published on Marketing Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Marketing Dive newsletter.
Uber will integrate Instacart's Carrot Ads platform into its own advertising system in the U.S. in a bid to provide a range of capabilities across its Uber Eats offering for CPG advertisers of all sizes, per a company announcement.
CPG advertisers will be able to create sponsored product campaigns across the Uber Eats grocery and retail marketplace through Instacart Ads Manager access. Advertisers will also be able to evaluate campaigns using Instacart's Carrot Ads performance and measurement capabilities.
Delivery services continue to ramp up platform advertising opportunities as they look to drive revenue in a competitive category by monetizing their customer data. Last month, DoorDash introduced new advertising features designed to attract CPG and retail advertisers to its Double Dash feature.
The Instacart integration will enhance Uber Advertising's offering through a Shoppable Display format and other performance marketing engagement tools, supporting the ride-hailing company's efforts to reach a broad range of CPG marketers.
'Our advertising team already works with many of the world's largest brands directly, but we want to be there for brands of all sizes to help them easily reach our engaged audience in a way that suits them,' said Travis Colvin, general manager of grocery and retail at Uber Advertising, in a statement. 'For the US market, we believe this integration best achieves that goal.'
Uber late last year appointed Kristi Argyilan as global head of its burgeoning advertising business, enlisting an executive who helped build retail media networks at companies like Albertsons and Target. Argyilan has been tasked with introducing new ad formats and broadening the advertiser pool for the segment. Uber delivered a 20% revenue jump in Q4 2024, for a total of $12 billion. Its advertising business was track to surpass $1 billion in revenue in 2024.
Instacart's Carrot Ads supports more than 7,000 brands while more than 220 retail banners use the solution for their retail media businesses and to run ads on e-commerce sites. Instacart's Q4 revenue totaled $883 million, missing analysts expectations and dragging down the company's stock value.
Uber and Instacart have been cozying up to one another for a while, which was evident in a collaborative feature launched last year that enables Instacart users to order restaurant delivery through Uber Eats via a Restaurants tab on the former's app. A deeper relationship adds fuel to the fire that Uber and Instacart are moving closer to a merger, an idea floated by an analyst last year. In such a scenario, both companies would stand to gain by accessing new lines of potential customers and customer data.
Recommended Reading
Uber hires Target, Albertsons retail media maven to lead ads business
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
Sharpie, Rubbermaid marketer partners with Adobe around generative AI
This story was originally published on Marketing Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Marketing Dive newsletter. Newell Brands and Adobe are partnering to activate generative artificial intelligence (AI) with Adobe Firefly and Adobe Express, Marketing Dive can exclusively share. The consumer goods marketer is also expanding its use of Adobe's content supply chain solutions to optimize planning, content creation, activation and measurement. The partnership comes as Newell looks to continue a business transformation strategy under new CMO Nick Hammitt. Previous CMO Melanie Huet was recently promoted to co-CEO of the company's home and commercial segment. Newell Brands, a consumer good company that notched $1.6 billion in net sales in Q1 2025, is investing in marketing across channels, including social media and e-commerce, with the goal of creating five times more content while improving efficiency and effectiveness. As part of this strategy, the company has a new partnership with Adobe around its generative AI services. The partnership with Adobe is multifold. Newell's content supply chain is now powered by Adobe's generative AI solutions, including its suite of Adobe Firefly Services, that enable content creation at scale through streamlining tasks like resizing and swapping backgrounds. Newell will also use Adobe Firefly Custom Models that are trained on the marketer's proprietary assets and ensure that content creation is on-brand. Using the models for its Paper Mate brand accelerated content production by 75% and shortened time-to-market — efficiencies the marketer hopes to replicate across its portfolio. Newell has also seen early success with Adobe Express, which allows it to define templates and brand guidelines for marketing teams. Its team in Latin America used Express on the production process for Oster social content to cut the time it takes to create 52 assets by 33%, from 12 hours down to eight hours. News of the partnership comes days after Newell shuffled its executive ranks, promoting its CMO to a co-CEO role and its vice president of marketing to CMO. New CMO Hammitt will be responsible for developing and executing marketing strategies to drive brand growth, increase market share and enhance consumer engagement and conversion. The executive previously held senior roles at The Campbell's Company, PepsiCo and Unilever. 'As CMO, I look forward to working with our brand teams to deliver bold, insight-driven marketing and commercial innovation that deepens consumer engagement, drives conversion, and fuels long-term brand equity,' Hammitt said in a press release. Newell joins a list of other marketers betting on generative AI to boost content marketing, including others who are leveraging Adobe's AI services this year. Brands under the Newell umbrella include Coleman, Oster, Yankee Candle, Rubbermaid and more. In Q1 2025, Newell Brands saw net sales decline 5.3% year-over-year to $1.6 billion, with core sales declining only 2.1%. However, President and CEO Chris Peterson noted that the results were in-line or better than the company's expectations, later saying that the executive moves were part of its strategy to connect with consumers and accelerate performance of its portfolio. Recommended Reading Estée Lauder continues generative AI push with Adobe integration Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Axios
5 hours ago
- Axios
Exclusive: Lyft launches new ad formats
Lyft is ramping up its ad business with new formats, the ride-hailing company exclusively tells Axios. Why it matters: Beyond traditional publishers, more companies with consumer attention and first-party data have looked to advertising to diversify and grow revenue. Driving the news: Lyft's updated ad portfolio includes three formats. Sponsored Map Vehicles, now available to all brands, offers a full-day takeover of the Lyft map including custom vehicle icons and optional real-world car wraps and branding. Sponsored Rides by Mode lets brands subsidize standard or priority rides with their branding featured on the Lyft homepage and during the ride. Vertical Video is a full-screen, non-skippable video format that plays when riders select the Wait and Save option and are waiting for a car. This week, Lyft also announced measurement deals with IAS and DoubleVerify to verify media quality. The big picture: Lyft is one of many tech and retail companies building ad businesses on top of their platforms. Uber launched ads in its Uber Eats app in 2020 and later expanded ads to its ride-hailing app. Last month, it reported an annualized ad revenue run rate of $1.5 billion. DoorDash this week announced it surpassed an annualized ad revenue run rate of more than $1 billion and acquired ad tech platform Symbiosys. Zoom in: Lyft is on a smaller scale. CEO David Risher said earlier this month the company is on track to reach a $100 million annualized ad revenue run rate by year's end. But it's aiming to grow with new hires and products. Suzie Reider, who founded YouTube's revenue and marketing team and later worked as Waze's global chief revenue officer, joined in December as executive vice president of Lyft Media and Lyft Business. She told Axios that her team has embraced being a challenger. "Given that we do not have the scale that Meta or Google have, we hustle in the mindset of 'necessity is the mother of innovation,'" Reider said. "In this era of AI, algorithmic, massively scaled and programmatic media, our team will eagerly engage in creative solutions." Between the lines: The strength of these new ad sellers is a trove of first-party data, including real-time location, destination and intent, alongside an engaged customer spending meaningful time on the platform. Reider said a rider spends 24 minutes, on average, with Lyft between waiting and riding. Lyft has attracted brands with specific marketing objectives, including driving store traffic and raising awareness at events and conferences, Reider said.
Entrepreneur
6 hours ago
- Entrepreneur
Nvidia CEO Says This Is the Decade of Autonomous Vehicles
At the VivaTech conference in Paris this week, Nvidia revealed its autonomous vehicle development platform for automakers to build self-driving cars. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicts the global autonomous vehicle and robotics industries are set to see significant growth in the next few years. "This is going to be the decade of AV [autonomous vehicles], robotics, autonomous machines," Huang told CNBC in an interview at the VivaTech conference in Paris on Thursday. At VivaTech, Nvidia debuted Nvidia Drive, an autonomous vehicle development platform allowing automakers to build self-driving cars. The company also released Cosmos Predict-2, a new AI model trained on 20,000 hours of real-world driving data, which allows self-driving cars to perform well in challenging weather conditions like fog and rain. Related: Nvidia's CEO Says It No Longer Matters If You Never Learned to Code: 'There's a New Programming Language' Nvidia sells both hardware and software products for autonomous vehicles, including the Nvidia DGX software platform, which trains self-driving cars on different driving scenarios. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the VivaTech trade show. PhotoHuang has predicted growth in the autonomous vehicle market for some time. In January, he said in a keynote at the consumer tech conference CES that "the autonomous vehicle revolution is here." "You're going to see the pace of AV development increasing tremendously over the next several years," he said at the event. Last month, Huang told Yahoo Finance that one day "every single car" will have an autonomous component. Related: Uber CEO Wants to Partner With Tesla on Robotaxis Because 'No One Wants to Compete Against Tesla or Elon' Self-driving cars are becoming more common in the U.S., with Google-owned Waymo providing 250,000 paid robotaxi trips per week in cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin. Customers are willing to pay more for the robotaxi experience. According to a report shared with TechCrunch on Thursday, Waymo rides are more expensive than Lyft and Uber rides, but riders pay more anyway. The average price of a Waymo is about $11 more per trip than a Lyft and $9.50 more than an Uber. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in January that autonomous vehicles would take over the jobs of human Uber drivers within the next 10 to 20 years. Uber drivers made three billion trips in the first quarter of 2025, a 14% year-over-year growth in monthly active customers. Related: Uber's CEO Says Drivers Have About 10 Years Left Before They Will Be Replaced Nvidia mentioned in its latest financial results last month that revenue from its automotive division was $329 million, up 11% year-over-year due to its self-driving technology. Nvidia's Chief Financial Officer, Colette Kress, said in a conference call with analysts that Chinese EV maker Xiaomi built its SU7 sedan on Nvidia's self-driving platform. Nvidia is one of the most valuable companies in the world at the time of writing, second only to Microsoft, with a market cap of over $3.5 trillion.
