Article written by the Hub Institute
Retail media" has often been reduced to the sum of marketing operations carried out by retailers at the point of sale (physical and e-commerce). Brands see it as a way to optimize the last step of their conversion tunnel. However, retail media practices have evolved considerably and now allow to optimize the top of the tunnel, such as product desirability or marketing. Decryption with Cdiscount Advertising.

The French Retail Media in full acceleration

Before we can decipher the evolution of Retail Media practices, we need to understand its scope. What does this notion mean? A quick look at the Definition Marketing website shows us that :

"The term retail media, which is still relatively new, generally refers to all the advertising offers that can be made by retail chains (traditional distribution and e-commerce). Retail media therefore covers traditional point-of-sale advertising as well as the advertising uses of transactional data. A definition that the site also illustrates from a speech that took place on during our HUBDAY Future of Retail & E-commerce 2019.

Christophe Blot, Managing Director of Cdiscount Advertising, sums it up this way: "it is the last media before the purchase, whether in store or with e-commerce players."

Although recent, this notion of "retail media" is attracting investments from more and more brands. Thus, in its observations on 2019, the Observatoire de l'e-pub emphasizes that retailers' websites and apps are the media category that has seen the strongest growth in its allocated budgets in France: +30.8% (i.e. +217 million euros), while digital, in the broadest sense of the term, shows an average growth of +12%.

This growth can be explained by the very strong dynamism of retail media, and more particularly retail search solutions. In the same way as sponsored results on Google, brands can thus buy keywords to optimise the referencing of their offers in the search results presented by e-commerce platforms. This process generated nearly 200 million euros in turnover in 2019, i.e. 10% of the global weight of search marketing.

How to build the marketing funnel from retail media

By positioning itself at the bottom of the conversion tunnel, retail media has always been considered as a factor for increasing incremental performance at the point of sale. It has also led industrial brands to ally themselves with retailers who give them access to the data necessary to optimise their marketing operations, thus creating a virtuous circle of mutual stimulation.

According to Christophe Blot, we can distinguish three types of data provided by retailers' media agencies:

• Socio-demographic data, from registration forms on websites or loyalty cards in stores;
• Browsing data on e-commerce platforms, showing the purchase intention of Internet users;
• Transactional data related to all purchases made (online validated shopping carts and in-store receipts).

In addition, this data allows Cdiscount Advertising to define several user personas that are made available to brands to enrich their marketing targeting.

From now on, this data is strategic to work "more and more upstream of the conversion tunnel with our retail media budgets" admits Nicolas Dumaille, Digital Retail Marketing manager for Microsoft France. "We adopt a premium product strategy, with relatively high prices. We can't just rely on performance, we also have to work on the desirability of the product."

Opinion shared by Christophe Blot who notes that, according to Fevad, "only 2% of visits to an e-commerce site lead to a purchase. But the majority of Internet users browse these sites in order to prepare for a future purchase, they express an intention which, if taken into account, will enable them to move up the conversion tunnel.

Microsoft uses retail media to optimize both the bottom and the top of its conversion funnel. "It allows us to acquire a form of marketing intelligence that we don't have and thus to work on performance KPIs, but also product desirability, purchase intent, or even brand memorization."

Combined with the results of its retail media campaigns on Cdiscount, this data is used by Microsoft to optimize its marketing campaigns (particularly in the form of video content) aimed at promoting brand preference and the desirability of its products. People who have watched at least 70% of the videos are then retargeted "in synergy with the highlights of our retail partners' schedules" explains Nicolas Dumaille.

Retail media campaigns are much more effective when the top of the tunnel is worked on. "Since we have been operating in this way, we have multiplied the ROAS (return on advertising spend) of our campaigns by 3!

Launch of a search marketing platform for Cdiscount

Since one month, Cdiscount Advertising has launched its own eponymous platform in order to allow its partner brands to pre-empt search results on the Cdiscount platform. An activity that was already possible before "but was done via an external provider" explains Christophe Blot.

In addition, Cdiscount Advertising Retail Solution (CARS) offers certified training courses, in partnership with Accenture, in order to qualify marketers in retail media techniques and more particularly in retail search.

The tool, developed entirely in-house by Cdiscount's IT department, will have mobilized about a hundred specialists. While Christophe Blot admits that this internalization was carried out, in part, for economic reasons in order to keep control of "one of the biggest marketing products on retail sites", it also aimed to improve the clarity of the service offered as well as its performance. "It was much more ergonomic to bring the tool closer to the data it uses: the searches typed directly on our e-commerce platform."