Transcript
Deterministic holistic media measurement has long been the holy grail of marketers. Having more transparency over the customer journey at which touch points drive customers to the point of channel agnostic transaction. However, with seemingly overwhelming complexity and horribly fragmented data sets, the question remains, is this even possible?
Well, hoping to answer this is our panel of experts from Boots, Criteo, and LiveRamp. And they will discuss how advertisers can solve modern brand challenges, how we’re closer than ever to creating the connected customer view and how the world of holistic measurement opens up with collaboration.
So please welcome to the stage our panel, Naomi Yonge, Principal Product Manager, Data Science of LiveRamp, Oliver Shayer, Omni-Media Director at Boots, and Nicole Kivel, Managing Director of Criteo.
Amazing. Good afternoon. Manchester, well, this is incredible. It’s incredible to be here. Good afternoon. I’ve seen my team here. It’s amazing. Thank you very much for coming.
So I’m Ollie Shayer. I’m the Omni-Media Director at Boots. So I look after Boots’ own media investment, and I also look after BMG, which is our retail media group as well. And I’m here with our team from Criteo and LiveRamp.
Hi, everyone. I’m Nicole Kivel, Managing Director at Criteo.
Hey, everyone. I’m Naomi Yonge. I’m a Principal Product Manager at LiveRamp, looking after all things measurement.
I’m gonna kick us off, just with as kind of modern marketers, we’re always told about the importance of data-driven marketing. It’s always something that’s at the top of the list. When we talk to a lot of our brand partners, it’s something that’s really important to them. But there are some challenges that come with it.
So, at the moment, when we look to do things in the data space, it’s often very fragmented. It’s really tough to put data together. There is probably now more than ever the volume of data that’s available is huge. But, actually, how do you bring that all together? And if you can bring it together, it’s generally either siloed. So it’s either in tools or into plans or different channel categories.
And it’s not able to easily bring that together to make it work. Secondly, if you can get all that information together, the ability to then take that, put that into a media platform and activate it, and effectively measure the effect of that is equally as difficult.
And then finally, as someone who works in the retail space, the ability to understand the effectiveness not only when you’re delivering that in the digital space where we spent an enormous amount of time focusing on attribution, but also in the store space is really hard. And for a lot of brands where eighty plus percent of their sales go through a store environment, that leaves a huge blind spot. So you’re missing out on a massive amount of effectiveness that you should be delivering.
So do not be depressed. This is not the theme of the next twenty minutes. We will add some light and joy into the opportunities there. There is hope there. And, one of the big opportunities is with the kind of advent of first party data and the technologies that go with that, and particularly the data that retailers hold, what it allows you to do is have a really strong understanding of what is your customer doing, when are they doing it, and then being able to take that data and push that through into platforms, and then also to measure that. So, we’re going to talk to you a little bit about it over the next twenty minutes.
So, research shows that sixty percent of brands are still struggling to use their first party data for measurement, which means there’s a whole host of different brands out there who who are still relying on either third party solutions or maybe upper funnel metrics to quantify how their media is doing, when actually, those don’t tie to the key business objective that most people are trying to solve, which is your media driving revenue?
So measurements obviously had a challenge over the last decade. There’s been a number of things happening in the industry with, quite rightly, data privacy concerns coming in with GDPR, the will they, won’t they situation of third party cookie depreciation.
So it has been challenging for brands to get a more omnichannel measurement approach sorted. That said, we do have some brands finding privacy first ways to collaborate with data now, and start to measure the broader parts of their media with using their retail data and ultimately get to that end goal, which is the media effectiveness.
So in a minute, I’m going to hand over to Boots to talk about that, because even as a commerce partner, where commerce partners have both the media ownership and the transaction data, they should have a step ahead to quantifying how that media is going, but there still is challenges in that flow there, too. So I’m going to hand back to Ollie to talk about how Boots is solving this.
Amazing. Hopefully some of you were here earlier. You saw Pete Markey, my boss, talking a little bit about AdCard and the importance of AdCard for Boots. So some of the stats, seventeen million customers on AdCard in the UK. One transaction takes place every five seconds in the UK. This is tied to an AdCard. And AdCard has been around for over twenty-five years. So it’s the largest health and beauty loyalty scheme in the UK. It’s a critical part for us at Boots, both for Boots and for Boots Media Group. The reason being is it allows us to understand consumers’ insight. So what are they doing? It allows us to, therefore, build audiences from that, and then it allows us to push that through into platforms where we can effectively measure that and tie that back into what we’re doing. It’s a kind of red thread that lies through what we do.
And a lot of the work that we’ve done over the last kind of four years in building what we’ve been doing at Boots in the media space and equally at BMG It’s been about how can we take that data, combine that data with our sales data, bring that all together with our partners at LiveRamp, and then create a platform where we can then connect to other partners to allow us to understand and collaborate to understand the effectiveness of our media, but also to generate more insights.
Our partnership with Criteo is incredibly important to us. We’ve worked with them over the last five years, both on-site in our sponsored search and then display. We sat down together as a group in a much smaller room than this. And we were thinking to ourselves, where are the opportunities that we can see, where we can kind of tie together the data that we have and the opportunities and the exposure we get from the work we do with Criteo, and bring that all together. And so I’ll hand over to Nicole.
Yeah. And so we all understand the incredibly rich data that a retailer like Boots possesses.
But for a brand to drive meaningful engagement and effective marketing, it’s absolutely vital for them to connect the dots around the fragmentation that exists within that dataset.
They truly need to understand who is the shopper? What are they buying? What are they buying in store? What are they buying offline?
What are they buying at certain periods of the year? What are they browsing? And for them to connect those dots enables them to tailor the right messaging and optimise the media in the way in which the right message to the right consumer with the right product reaches them in that pivotable shopping moment.
Once this is achieved, well, it has a knock on effect that’s going to benefit the shopper who’s at the centre of all of this, but also the advertiser and the retailer.
By bringing a hyper relevant personalised message to the consumer, you’re engaging with them in a way that makes sense for them, that’s going to continue and benefit the customer experience, that brings them back, that ensures that they’re going to be making those purchases, that feeds back into those measurement pieces and insights.
So I’ll hand it back to Ollie in terms of how we solved for this.
So a pretty diagram to show you how we solved for it. So, what we’ve built at Boots over the course of the last kind of four years is a way into which we can take our partnership with a range of different partners, bring that together, and fuse that with the audience data that we’ve got in the ad card space. We start with the audiences from an ad card perspective. Really rich, two hundred audiences that we have pre-built in there, but we build custom audiences depending on what the requirements are for our customers and, equally, what our requirements are for ourselves.
We can push that through to BMG, which is our retail media network, and Pete also talked a little bit about that earlier, which is where we work with all of our supplier partners, and enable them to then look at those audiences, the insights, and equally also which are the ones they want to target. And then we have a range of options to activate. So everything through all of the channels that we have on-site, off-site, and also in store through digital channels that we’re enabling programmatically in the future. So enabling us to really create that single way that you can take an audience through to our channels. And we’ve done that in our partnership with Criteo.
Obviously, I said we’ve worked with them for a number of years. We’re working with them in the sponsor search space, and we’re equally working for them in the display space. And we’ve activated this for the display space. We’re able to take those audiences, push them into that, and then activate that audience against the display that they’re seeing on-site.
I think critically, as we touched on at the beginning, enabling that two sided view. So not only the view of the on-site activity, which is generally where we normally flow, but equally in store. So taking that holistic view, which gives us an omni performance. And all of that is underpinned by the data that we’ve been able to place into LiveRamp.
So it really is a collaboration of forces coming together that enables that, bringing all that data, both our ad card data, our transactional data, but then all of that media data together that then enables us to build this for us going forward. And we’ve been running this over the course of the last four years for a range of different partners, both for Boots and increasingly for our supplier partners as well.
And the most important thing is, what is the outcome? How does this have a real-world impact for advertisers and the consumers and themselves? Because again, they’re always at the heart of this. And so what we were able to see is that by coupling this and being able to account for the true omnichannel in-store and online, we were able to see on average a twenty two percent uplift in the return on ad spend. So being able to achieve greater routes for advertisers and brands, but ultimately being able to truly understand the shopper and attribute fully that holistic shopper journey.
Great. And it’s great to hear how by collaborating with data there, you’ve been able to solve that piece of the puzzle. But I think in reality, marketers are aware that the customer journey is a lot longer than that. So let’s take an example of a type of product stocked at Boots, say a new mascara.
I’m in market to buy it. I might first see a TV ad. I then, while I’m watching TV, search it on my phone, go to boots.com, see it, put it in my basket, get completely distracted by what was on TV, put my phone down. A couple of days later, I might be looking online, I get hit with some influencer marketing for this new product.
I then might see some social ads, and then, Okay, fine, I’m convinced. I go back to Boots and then browse it again, see the on-site ads, and then think, ‘Actually, no, I’m going to be in town tomorrow. I’ll go into Boots and look for it there.’ Finally, I see the point of sale media that’s there, and I go on to convert.
But who’s getting the credit for that sale?
And I think an additional challenge that commerce media brings is what area of the brand media is funding that as well. So, throughout those touch points, some of this will be funded by broader brand media, some of this will be part local teams working with their commerce media partners. So who is really taking the credit for that final sale?
And this is something that previously would have been solved by solutions like multi touch attribution, which, as I mentioned with the challenges that we’ve had in previous years, has sort of been a bit dead in the water with brands not being able to get access to publisher logs or maybe not be able to combine their offline and online data with difficulties tracking that. But we’re moving towards a new advent of technology with clean rooms, where we’re starting to solve for some of these challenges.
So the four key challenges that we hear from marketers is around, firstly, privacy.
For big platforms to want to be able to share their exposure logs with brands, and for brands to want to share their transaction data with those big platforms, it has to be done in a privacy safe way.
We also need identity to connect that. So as Ollie talked about, he’s also got Advantage Card, where you can track online and offline sales with Advantage Card, but maybe not all brands have that. You’ve got some online touch points, offline touch points, as well as cookies, as well as TV ads served on boxes, so that all needs to be brought together on one identity space.
We also need a place to host all of that data, in one place that everyone who needs it can access it. And lastly, for it to be really actionable, you need to be able to visualise this and have reporting so you can go in and make in-flight adjustments to your campaigns off the back of the insights that you’re learning.
So as a measurement nerd, I’m very excited about these clean rooms coming up, because we’re going to see what I think is the rebirth of multi-touch attribution. So we’re already seeing with some partners in the US who are coming together to work in clean rooms and get access to publisher logs from all across the ecosystem to start running measurement like this. And I hope you guys don’t mind, I took the liberty to put your logos up here.
But this is the future state that we think clean room, no matter which clean room partner you partner with, with, will move towards. We’re starting to be able to deterministically link those exposures back to the transactions and be able to put different weights of credit across the customer journey in whichever model that your business feels best. But, for example, was it that initial search that I made that made me buy that mascara? Was it that final point of sale that I saw when I went into Boots that finally convinced me? And talking about how you can give credit equally to the full media journey.
So this is what we feel is the future. Obviously, with working with clean rooms, you’re getting access to all that data, and there’s lots of different other use cases, segmentation, activation, all different insights cases.
But, yeah, the future and what we’re moving towards is this new tech solution where we can collaborate across the ecosystem much more easily.
Amazing. So, at the beginning, I said hopefully it wouldn’t depress you over the course of twenty minutes. Hopefully, that’s not been the case.
Hopefully, what you see is the opportunity that’s there. Hopefully, indicated by the fact three different partners standing on the stage together, showing the opportunity and the collaboration that can take place in a fully privacy safe way that allows us to use customer data combined with the technology and combined with other datasets to allow us to bring all of that together to give a much clearer view of what’s actually take going on when you’re showing customers, advertising and the effectiveness of that. So, hopefully you enjoyed the presentation. If there’s any other questions that you have, please, we’ll be around this week. Come talk to us the next few days. And thank you guys so much for listening.
Thanks, everyone.