Digiday reports that advertisers are asking what happens to costs, data and measurement now that DoorDash and Instacart are joining forces.
Costs and data are fair questions. Measurement is the one I'd press hardest.
A bigger combined platform means one seller reporting sales results on its own ads. That's grading your own homework. The dashboard can look great and still shouldn't be trusted by default.
Platform-attributed sales count every buyer who saw or touched an ad. Plenty of them would have bought anyway. Incrementality tells you which ones wouldn't.
So before you move more budget to the combined offering, get an independent party measuring lift against your own data, like your analytics. Run a holdout test. Put that number next to what the platform reports.
If they match, good. If they don't, you've learned how much you were paying for sales you'd already won.
Responding to Here are the questions on advertisers’ minds after the DoorDash-Instacart deal, Digiday