Dollar General teams with Kevel, Trade Desk on unified retail media solution

Dollar General’s latest retail media move is about more than ad buyers and dashboards. By teaming with Kevel and The Trade Desk on a unified solution, the chain is pushing deeper into a model where the store floor, the digital screen, and the checkout journey all have to line up for the same campaign to work.

The April 30 announcement said the new setup is designed to unify onsite and offsite activation with consistent measurement across the full consumer journey. It also supports both managed service and self-service activation, which matters because it gives brands more than one way to buy into Dollar General’s traffic. For the stores, that usually translates into more products getting promotional support, more localized campaigns, and more pressure to keep pricing, signage, and displays aligned with what customers are seeing online and hearing in the aisle.

That is not a small shift for a retailer built on speed and tight margins. Dollar General first launched its media network, DGMN, in 2018, and by June 2022 it said the network reached more than 18,000 stores in 47 states and handled more than two billion transactions a year. The company has also leaned hard on its rural footprint, saying about 75% of its stores serve markets of 20,000 people or fewer. In other words, Dollar General is selling advertisers access not just to shoppers, but to shoppers in places where national campaigns often have less precision.

The company has kept adding pieces to that pitch. In March 2023, Dollar General said it was the first retailer to offer closed-loop measurement of in-store sales through its Meta partnership, reaching more than 90 million unique customer profiles across Meta placements. In May 2025, Kevel said it was powering Dollar General’s retail media network technology, and Dollar General’s media network later described a portfolio spanning owned, on-site and off-site tactics with self-service options and about 60% of U.S. households shopping at Dollar General in 2024.

The store-level context got even louder on April 13, when Dollar General said it would roll out an AI-enabled in-store audio network with QSIC across about 6,000 more stores in 48 states, bringing its total audio footprint to 12,000 stores in the second quarter. That means more rooms on the sales floor where advertising and operations overlap, from audio messages to end-cap tie-ins and price updates.

The bigger picture is clear: Dollar General is trying to make its stores easier to buy, measure, and optimize for brands. For employees, that can mean more execution work every week, more coordination between merchandising and pricing, and less room for sloppy promotional setup. The category is also moving toward common measurement standards, with IAB and IAB Europe publishing in-store retail media definitions and guidance, which shows this is becoming a more formal part of how retail gets run.