Romain Gauthier is Commercial Director for MediaMath France and also founder of Tactads, a provider of cookieless and cross-device targeting technologies which was acquired by MediaMath in 2014. Romain was recently interviewed by French publication Viuz about the retail programmatic landscape – below is a translated summary of this interview.You can view the original interview in French here.
Viuz: Tell me about programmatic marketing in the retail vertical.
Romain: Retailers outspend every vertical in the programmatic space – and so are no strangers to the effectiveness and potential that programmatic marketing provides. However, that doesn’t mean that creating a programmatic marketing practice is a simple or necessarily straightforward process that happens overnight. Although retailers sit on a vast amount of 1st-party data, it is a challenge for them to actually leverage that data to drive greater ROI in their digital marketing efforts. Retail marketers cite measuring their offline store sales back to their online media spend and creating a holistic view of their audiences across channels as their biggest challenges. The demand for a complete solution – that enables not only retailers, but also FMCG/CPG brands and agencies working with both verticals to tackle these issues – has led us to develop MediaMath Retail, a tailored solution that meets the unique needs of these marketers – and since its launch we have seen positive results with major retailers such as L.L. Bean in the US. MediaMath Retail packages our media activation solutions with partner solutions such as Axciom for the management of data, dynamic creative with Flashtalking and Spongecell, customised targeting through Alkemics, plus major media agencies. This package empowers retailers to put the technology and their data to optimal use, allowing them to take offline data and use it to provide relevant online promotions.
Viuz: Can you share any best practice examples of retailers using programmatic?
Romain: For one large distributor in the fashion industry that wanted to reduce its cost of acquisition and increase sales, we used dynamic creatives on the Facebook Exchange, which automatically pushed the promotion of the most popular products in each category resulting in a cost per acquistion (CPA) 97% lower than the customer’s expectations. In another example, an ecommerce brand implemented a dynamic allocation model for its entire conversion funnel (what we call the “full life cycle” approach). For this project, we used contextual targeting to attract a new audience, effectively driving more people down the path to purchase. The results – a 20% increase in website traffic, $27 generated on each dollar invested in retargeting and $2 generated for each dollar invested in the exploration part of the campaign.
Viuz: How do you combine first, second, and third-party data for the campaigns of your retail clients?
Romain: For first party data, MediaMath’s Data Management Platform (DMP) attaches data to a client or prospect’s profile so that brands can activate against this data, automate execution and optimise interactions across all addressable media to provide a better experience to every customer. With second-party data we have a data cooperative architecture that allows a data exchange between complementary players (distributor and cosmetics for example). The data cooperative is a key area for us because it is a potential source of revenue for our customers from the retail industry and everyone who is interested in buying quality data available on the market. With third-party data, we use more than thirty data partners to identify specific audiences before activating the data on the programmatic markets for our customers.
Viuz: How do you measure offline sales?
Romain: Partnering with LiveRamp we can collate and store offline customer data in our platform. LiveRamp matches offline individuals (loyalty cardholders for example) to online profiles, allowing retailers to ensure maximum optimisation across all channels both online and offline.
Read more about MediaMath Retail.