EXCLUSIVE: How One Marketing Company Is Making Big Investments in Tech to Power Custom Solutions

Quad's in-store media program, In-Store Connect, provides brands and grocers new and unobtrusive ways to connect with shoppers in the aisle.

From eye tracking glasses that gauge consumer behavior at the point of sale to in-store vertical video banners that capture shoppers’ attention to custom displays, Quad is training its sights on and investing in technologies that help brands and grocers get a handle on shoppers’ preferences and habits. Now, the global marketing experience company that started as a commercial printer in 1971 is teaming up with Google Cloud to help brands deliver even more highly personalized content at scale across multiple marketing channels.

Through the new collaboration, the Sussex, Wisc.-based Quad is integrating its proprietary data stack with Google Cloud’s AI optimization capabilities and large language models. Brand and retail partners can leverage the tech to create content, layouts, image generation and other marketing elements that resonate with shoppers across their browsing and buying journey. Quad will also deploy AI to provide enhanced workflow optimization.

Progressive Grocer recently attended a media day event hosted at Quad’s 906,000-square-foot print manufacturing facility and innovation center in West Allis, Wisc., where company leaders shared details about the Google Cloud collab and other advances in the CPG and grocery sectors spanning in-store seasonal displays, dynamic postal optimization solutions, virtual “try-on” technologies and more.

George Forge, SVP of client technology and product development for Quad, explained the benefits of the new AI capabilities. “Imagine as a marketer, if you had access to this brilliant data stack that is super predictive and can help you build audience dynamically. But imagine if it was as easy as Chat GPT – just saying, ‘Hey, I want to create an audience. Here's my budget, here's the type of consumers that I want to reach here's what I want to achieve.’ And out of that is a customized audience plan for you,” he told the innovation day attendees. “That gets down to the audience, it gets down to the content, and that gets down to the channel itself.”

Quad was founded as a commercial printing company and has continued to build on its printing, graphics and tech capabilities to help retailers and CPGs engage shoppers.

Added Joshua Lowcock, president of the Quad Media division: “The thing that I like about this is it democratizes the power of activated data. Everybody talks about data stacks as being very important and differentiated. The real value in data is actually democratizing access. I need to get it in the hands of the people that are client-facing every day – that way we'll actually do transformational marketing for clients and the highly personalized and relevant messaging means that suddenly all the promise of digital can be delivered.”

At the innovation event, Forge also showcased and underscored the power and potential of in-store retail media such as the Quad’s new In-Store connect vertical video banners that are now in use at select Save Mart stores. “The goal is to just really digitize that in-store experience, together what the retailer needs with what the customer needs," he said, noting that 85 cents of every retail dollar are still transacted at brick-and-mortar locations. “To put in simple terms, the industry needs aggregation and they need an ‘easy button.’ How do we actually build content that's purpose built for these screens? These are very purpose built for an in-store retail environment.”

According to Forge, Quad is planning to launch a new programmatic integration into the in-store retail media program in 2025.