Citrus helps grocery retailers rival Amazon ad business

Australian startup Citrus is eyeing “a lot more market penetration across Europe and US markets” following a tie up with Ocado.

The pureplay recently went live with its new digital advertising platform, with Ocado, Head of Grocery Merchandising and Product, Alice Mannion, saying: “We aim to be the best place to launch new brands and are dedicated to helping our smaller suppliers grow. Citrus ticks all the boxes for us, it’s scalable, secure, easy to integrate and crucially delivers better optimised exposure for our smaller to medium sized brands.”

In an interview with RTIH, Citrus CEO, Brad Moran, says: “We have a strong desire to be the ad platform of choice for UK grocery retailers in particular and know that we can help them rival the ad business of Amazon.”

He adds: “This is actually one of the few technologies that works in a retailer’s favour if competitors are also on the platform. The bigger the pool of customers accessible to suppliers through the platform, the more funding the brands will give it. Individually, retailers will struggle to rival Amazon’s ad business, but together they are arguably more influential for advertisers given their collective bricks and mortar reach.”

There have been challenges along the way, with Moran noting the technology is best suited to Tier 1 retail customers that have long and arduous sales cycles. “Once we are able to get an audience with retailers, we are generally very successful in getting traction,” he insists.

There was also a setback in the US as a retailer backlash against Amazon and any technology vendor using its AWS platform gained momentum. “Being a startup, AWS was a nice technology platform to build our infrastructure on, but we have since steered away from AWS due to this reason. It is something that all retail tech startups should be aware of, particularly when dealing with US customers,” Moran observes.

Read the full interview here.