Sainsbury’s and Nectar360 have today announced their new platform Pollen, which they say will “supercharge” their retail media business and drive forward their strategy
Created in-house by Sainsbury’s and Nectar360, Pollen is “designed to solve the industry’s biggest pain points” and to support Nectar360’s “mission to create valuable relationships between customers and their favourite brands”.
Pollen is due to launch in late 2025 and will bring together “audience insights, media planning and activation, optimisation and measurement into one single platform”.
The new platform will also feature generative AI tools to “help brands and agencies optimise their campaign creative in the moment, build hyper-relevant audiences and plan media, simplifying the process and enabling Nectar360’s clients to get more effective campaigns live, quicker”.
Ahead of the announcement, Retail Week sat down with Amir Rasekh, managing director of Nectar360, the loyalty, insights and media services agency that owns and operates the UK’s largest loyalty programme Nectar.
He spoke about why retail media is having such a moment, what Pollen will allow clients like Sainsbury’s to do, and how generative AI has been integrated into the new platform.
Before we get into Nectar360 Pollen, what are the dynamics of the broader retail media market and why are so many retailers investing heavily in it?
“We own and operate the largest coalition loyalty programme in the UK called Nectar. Customers tell us the point of difference for them when they choose where to shop and why is that they really enjoy the value and utility they get from earning and spending points across some of the largest brands in the UK.
“Nectar is anchored by the two big retail brands with Sainsbury’s and Argos, but over the last 23 years of Nectar, we’ve added many partners into the mix. With this longer tail of partners within Nectar, we have 23 million customers engaging with the programme every year and we have a real depth and breadth to our customers’ understanding in Sainsbury’s and Argos as a consequence.
“For our customers, they can then understand, through our capabilities, shopper behaviours at an aggregated level. Who are they? What products are they buying? How are those products performing within a brand’s hierarchy? What is the path to purchase for those brands? There’s a whole plethora of other stuff.
“With a good retail media network, that allows our customers to engage with shoppers just as well as we can.”
How will Pollen redefine how Nectar360 retail media works and why is it an exciting milestone for you?
“The retail media market is really at an inflection point. It’s a high-growth market that has been on a growth trajectory for the last five or six years. We’ve been working on this for 15 years, and any high-growth market where the value is seen by paying clients starts to reconcile.
“The reason why it’s starting to reconcile is because this really works. But our clients and brands’ expectations are high. They want tech unification and smart AI; they want ease of use and they want more omnichannel experiences with multichannel attribution and great sophistication of measurement.
“Pollen was designed to answer and alleviate all of those pain points. It’s a platform designed to take retail media to the next level.”
Generative AI is something lots of retailers are interested in. Can you explain how it’s integrated into Pollen and what it allows the platform to do that it couldn’t otherwise?
“AI will play a major role in optimising our audiences, so the customer audiences that can be selected to support and underpin that retail media strategy based on objectives. There will be AI agents within the platform that the brand can use, or internal teams can use to make suggestions on certain objectives: what’s the best audience; what the campaign shape should be as a consequence.
“It also helps us double down and focus on pushing the boundaries of creativity and retail media. What customers want from retail media, outside of more personalisation and relevance to help with their shopping mission, is to see greater creativity in this space. They want to be engaged in a fun way, both online and in-store.
“Pollen will have its design studio and an AI functionality that allows customers to reshape brand assets and also use scoring to optimise the performance of the creative.”
Can you paint a picture of how Pollen will affect the daily shopping of Nectar customers at Sainsbury’s, for example?
“Pollen will help ensure that our retail media is personalised and relevant. Customers will see that. But it’ll be quite subtle in terms of direct effects on the customer experience. But subtle is good in the world of retail media because the balance is very delicate.
“The customer wants it to be seamless and additive to their experience. But a definite outcome of Pollen’s launch will be a better experience for our customers.”
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