How Tesco and WPP Media’s data-driven, personalised advertising strategy drove incremental sales, audiences and brand lift

The Challenge

As the UK’s leading grocery retailer, Tesco captures 23.6% of UK grocery sales and serves 23 million Clubcard members.

As a ‘champion of customers’, Tesco prioritises in delivering the best possible customer experience, grounded in two core pillars: fair prices and quality food.

Leveraging its position in grocery channel sales, Tesco also partners with numerous CPG brands for co-marketing campaigns. These collaborations promote products aligned with Tesco’s commitment to customer value.

Historically, Tesco and WPP Media employed a broad-reach, family-based digital marketing targeting strategy for their campaigns. However, to drive further growth, they sought a strategic shift towards targeted, defined audiences to enhance sales and key performance metrics.

As the holder of one of the richest first-party data sets in the UK, Tesco worked with WPP Media to plan a truly audience-led approach, from planning to measurement.

(Source: Tesco annual report 2024)

The Solution

Tesco and WPP Media partnered with LiveRamp to leverage Clubcard’s rich first-party data to identify growth opportunities and architect a powerful audience-led strategy.

From LiveRamp’s data collaboration platform, WPP Media strategically crafted and validated nine distinct growth audiences to use across their ‘fair price’ and ‘quality food’ campaigns.

Capitalising on LiveRamp’s extensive digital ecosystem connectivity to a wide range of premium addressable media channels, WPP Media seamlessly activated media for both campaigns across audience-led programmatic display and social media.

Building on a successful test that demonstrated significant scale and performance, Tesco and WPP Media launched a full-scale initiative focused on;

• Incremental Return on Advertising Spend
• Customer acquisition metrics
• Increasing sales uplift across product, creative and sales quantity
• Increasing basket sizes

The Results

Through harnessing LiveRamp’s data collaboration capabilities, Tesco and WPP Media unlocked the true potential of taking this type of audience-led approach.

By leading with strategic creative variations and activating messages programmatically based on audience insights, Tesco was able to provide experiences that resonated and proved successful through LiveRamp’s unprecedented measurement accuracy.

The campaigns were successful in every metric they sought to achieve across the nine defined audience groups;

Strong Media Effectiveness

• Up to £60 iROAS, demonstrating the efficiencies and profitability of building an audience-led strategy based on precision audience targeting and personalising creative

High Customer Acquisition

• New to Brand Uplift of up to 9% across the promoted product brand
• New to Brand sales increase of 4%, converting new customers into loyal buyers

Sales Uplifts

• Creative uplift of 6% proving the effectiveness of personalising messaging
• Product uplift of 4% where products were featured, attracting new customers and leading to increased demand

Basket Size Increase

• Up to 13% increase in basket size

Overall, the campaigns were a resounding success across all areas, effectively converting new customers and increasing spend across existing, directly impacting revenue for both Tesco and partner brands.