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10 minutes of expert insights every weekday. Your morning ritual for staying ahead in retail media.
Gopuff's head of ads: "I'm a realist"
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[00:00:00] Kiri Masters: to have a snowball's chance in hell of standing out in a crowded retail media landscape, an RMN has to lean into what makes it special as a retailer. I call it finding [00:00:15] what's wholly, the moat that keeps customers coming back, which the ad business should exploit and never damage.
[00:00:24] Gopuff, the app with roots in college campuses and youth culture, [00:00:30] has just partnered with Instacart to run its on-site ad capabilities, and that's a company that Gopuff has historically competed with in rapid delivery. It's the ultimate signal of what I call [00:00:45] recognizing what's wholly about the core retail business and unburdening the media business of distractions from that.
[00:00:53] For Michael Perrucca, who is Gopuff's head of ads and strategic partnerships, it's about being able to [00:01:00] move at the speed of youth culture and enabling its brand partners to hook into those key cultural moments. I had a conversation with Michael a couple of weeks ago
[00:01:14] [00:01:15] for a profile for my column at The Drum, where Michael laid out all of the practical reasons why this partnership with Instacart made a ton of sense, and how the company is upping its game with [00:01:30] experiences that only it can deliver on. My read is that Gopuff has worked out what is holy for it as a retailer, and the onsite ad stack isn't it.
[00:01:41] The late-night delivery bag is. [00:01:45] A version of this episode was first published to my column at thedrum.com
[00:01:49] On October 16, 2026. Let's dive in
[00:01:53]
[00:01:55] Kiri Masters: So the deal that Gopuff made with Instacart, in case you missed it, happened [00:02:00] in September, and the broad strokes are that Gopuff is going to join the Instacart marketplace, making available orders from their own warehouse network, which has the USP of being [00:02:15] able to as fast as fifteen minutes.
[00:02:17] Gopuff is also going to start using Carrot Ads, Instacart's white label ad technology, on its own app and website. And what Gopuff Ads team is going [00:02:30] to retain is selling bespoke campaigns directly
[00:02:35] Now, when that news came out, I did a quick hit in my newsletter about this, and I said, "The ceiling on an ads business without self-serve capabilities is how many [00:02:45] brands a sales team can personally reach. And that is a sales problem, a sales reach problem, and building your own ad tech isn't going to fix it."
[00:02:54] And Michael Perucka agrees. Gopuff launched its own platform three years ago, and [00:03:00] the pitch then was control. Brands and agencies should decide who sees their media rather than working inside of a black box Now Carrot Ads, who Gofuff teamed up with, shares that [00:03:15] belief in audience-based buying, and importantly, it also brings to the table more than nine thousand brand advertisers and a three hundred person sales team.
[00:03:27] Michael told me he's a [00:03:30] realist, and he understands where Gofuff sits in the food chain, and that we do need to fight for every dollar
[00:03:38] ~Being able to tap into that demand, being able to tap into that advertiser demand through Instacart gives them a really strong foundation in terms of revenue and frees his team up to actually go for the home runs. That is the creative managed activations that only Gopuff can run. We'll get to a couple of examples of those later~
[00:03:38] ~Tapping into that dema-- ~tapping into that advertiser demand from Instacart gives him a revenue base to work from [00:03:45] and frees up his team to go for the home runs of those creative managed activations that only Gopuff can run. So what kind of
[00:03:55] examples are we talking about here? Michael came with a whole armful [00:04:00] of really interesting experiential campaigns that Gopuff has been working with brand partners on, and it highlights what is unique about Gopuff's audience, which he says is 80% of the audience is aged 18 to [00:04:15] 34. So it is a youth audience.
[00:04:17] They're very much tapped into cultural moments and activating very, very quickly on a cultural moment, taking advantage of something that's happening On [00:04:30] TV, on social media, in sport, and facilitating a brand's reach into that youth audience
[00:04:37] So one example that he brought was Keebler, the maker of Chips Deluxe cookies, [00:04:45] and select Gopuff customers can add free Chips Deluxe fudge-filled cookies to their delivery with Keebler covering the delivery fee and the driver's tip. So that is, you know, a sampling play, and [00:05:00] Michael told me that new products that are launched with sampling had sales seventy percent higher at month four.
[00:05:07] That is based on Gopuff's own analysis of two years of ad campaigns. So this is a really unique value add [00:05:15] pitch to a certain type of CPG company that wants to drive trial. The fact that Gopuff is able to facilitate that kind of sampling activation is a real unique value add.
[00:05:25] Another example that he shared was the M&M's Rescue Squad, which [00:05:30] is a Halloween activation, and for three years they've done this. It's a standalone website that offers a free bag of candy to anyone who runs out of candy on Halloween, and Gopuff is that fulfillment partner behind the scenes. [00:05:45] So according to Gopuff, in twenty twenty-five, last year's event went live at five PM Eastern, when everyone is starting to run out of candy, and orders peaked at five:零四 PM, and the shelves were empty [00:06:00] by five:thirty-five PM. Are manual processes slowing down your RMN momentum? With GrowthLoop's composable [00:06:15] commerce media solution, retail media and ad teams can build and launch precise audiences in minutes, activate across DSPs and ad platforms, and deliver transparent [00:06:30] ROI reporting that drives advertiser revenue.
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[00:06:58] So to make this [00:07:00] possible is entirely dependent on owning the last mile. So this is what's different about Gopuff, especially compared to Instacart. Gopuff is itself a retailer that owns its own inventory, and that [00:07:15] means that it can act very quickly on a cultural moment in a way that intermediaries like Instacart or other delivery apps that don't hold their own inventory or, or marketplaces, um, they can't facilitate [00:07:30] These immediate purchases right away, they can't guarantee that they, that they're gonna have inventory available.
[00:07:37] So in its pitch to advertisers, Gopuff has that infrastructure to move products and fulfill anything, and that speed [00:07:45] of activation matters as much as the speed of delivery. And so that is what is Gopuff's holy trinity. from my perspective is number one, the youth audience, which has the roots and the street cred that give Gopuff [00:08:00] a backdoor key to youth culture.
[00:08:02] Secondly is this vertical integration, which lets the media team move fast on opportunities. And third is a shelf that is-- it, it's too small to be the everything store. It is limited. They have these [00:08:15] micro-fulfillment warehouses in major metro areas and near college campuses. They can't cav-carry everything.
[00:08:21] They need to have a very, um, deep but small SKU count. And so that kind of drives [00:08:30] scarcity, and it drives local, regional, uh, SKU selection as well. And that is the mix that the ads exist to exploit. They're not out there to be the everything store. They're not out there to be, you know, [00:08:45] the, the delivery ecosystem for suburban moms.
[00:08:49] Um, they are there to serve that holy trinity. So this leads us into what metrics are front and center for Michael and [00:09:00] his team. He says that he has a relatively young business. Gopuff is thirteen years old, and his merchandising team, he says, maybe isn't as traditional when it comes to their ways of working together.
[00:09:13] Now, I take that to [00:09:15] mean, you know, there's a lot of turf wars that happen between a media business and a merchandising business. We've talked about this quite a lot on this show. Competing interests, competing incentives, that can [00:09:30] often occur inside of a retailer. But Michael talks about shared incentives at Gopuff
[00:09:36] Michael and his head of merchandising both report to the co-chief executives and both work together on a metric of total [00:09:45] contribution profit. So that shared metric, combined with the preciousness of shelf space, both conflate in what Michael calls cubic profitability, which is a North Star concept [00:10:00] that relates both to the total contribution profit objective and the need for every single item on the shelf to turn fast enough to earn the space that it takes up
[00:10:10] Now wrapping up here, the article itself has an extra point which is [00:10:15] talking about this like continuum of retail and media and where different retailers sit on that spectrum. So there is an extra tidbit if you check out the newsletter today. But I'm going to just wrap up [00:10:30] today's episode so I can get you out of here in 10 minutes And that is one final tidbit from Michael Perucka.
[00:10:37] He set his sights on one scourge in the retail media ecosystem during our conversation. It is performative [00:10:45] vanity metrics like ROI and ROAS. He says that it's his job as the head of ads at Gopuff to move product because that, at the end of the day, is the one thing that cannot be gamed
[00:10:58] Now, the word from some [00:11:00] advertisers that I have spoken with, including agencies, is that Gopuff in particular is one of those entities that is really delivering on that promise, although that could be conflated with the growth that the whole fast delivery ecosystem is experiencing. [00:11:15] A senior agency-side media consultant told me that Gopuff and other fast delivery networks are among their top-performing RMNs right now.
[00:11:24] Part of that is a great ad product, and part of it is a segment that is growing really quickly. [00:11:30] category growth can hide a multitude of sins. The ten p.m. delivery bag is hard to scale, and there are well-heeled rivals ready to chip away at various aspects of Gopuff's value [00:11:45] proposition.
[00:11:45] One of those rivals just became an ally. It will be up to both of them to keep delivering. Thanks for listening. I'll link up to the original article in the show notes, and I'll catch you tomorrow
[00:11:57]