DCO & Retail Media Case Study: E-Commerce
Giant Eagle Activates
First-Party Data Successfully Via DCO & Retail Media
“Personalization doesn’t have to equal a huge lift and it can be done in a way that is operationally efficient”
– Joell Robinson, Giant Eagle Senior Director, Leap Media & Sales
Lift In Click-Through-Rate
Quicker To Launch New Offers
Giant Eagle is a regional grocery retailer also operating in the convenience space with 470 locations across the United States.
The grocer was starting down the path of bringing media buying in-house with a goal of providing the best advertising experience for their customers and partners alike.
In bringing multiple channels under internal operation, they realized the opportunity ahead of them to deliver better results for their supplier partners through their wealth of first-party data: retail media.
First On The Shopping List: Efficient Creative Versioning
Before coming to Jivox, scaling personalized marketing campaigns was a challenge where each creative was a manual build requiring a custom template. “Our creative bandwidth was stretched with an onus on partners to generate copy, product images and deliver assets.” says Jonathon Hunt, Senior Manager, Media Strategy & Activation at Giant Eagle. “Building hundreds of variations of creative with multiple rounds of revisions slowed down the campaign activation timeline; taking away from high-value activities such as optimization and strategy”.
Giant Eagle were smart to focus on how they could maintain a strong customer experience through the use of personalization. They didn’t want to just churn out high volumes of ads with no improvement for their valued customers. Their ambition was to offer relevant, useful, services and show more products in a more digestible way.
They realized creative versioning was needed but not enough on its own – the creative had to be dynamic and auto-updated via multiple first-party data points to show relevant products and offers. This would help them personalize across the customer journey from in-store to on-site (or vice-versa) in a scalable manner – so they set about a rigorous process to identify a partner that could support their growth.
With Jivox, Giant Eagle were able to plug in their product feed, which automatically parsed the product images and reduced the manual efforts of partners. This was combined with the ability to scale creative production through automated versioning that respected the team’s design ambitions and level of fidelity expected; ultimately leading to improved performance with a 54% uplift in CTR on average across campaigns launched through Jivox.
Fresh & Relevant Offers Driven By DCO
“Personalization doesn’t have to equal a huge lift and it can be done in a way that is operationally efficient” adds Joell Robinson, Senior Director, Leap Media & Sales. Giant Eagle has a wealth of data points that could be used to personalize ads to varying degrees; the key to getting started was to work with a partner like Jivox that can get the team up and running quickly with data-driven campaigns.
Giant Eagle took a multi-faceted approach to personalization; starting by understanding their customers’ behavior and journey across the website then combining with extensive first-party data in addition to data collected from outside such as geolocation and other contextual triggers like the weather conditions in an area.
Campaigns could then dynamically showcase relevant products and offers based on customers needs:
- Loyalty campaigns were a perfect use case for speaking to their customers on a more 1:1 level; products browsed or abandoned in the cart could be re-shown with messaging adjusted based on the loyalty status of the customer.
- Made-to-order food and drinks available from the GetGo business would be showcased based on location, time of day and weather-based signals.
- Curbside pickup options could also be shown within easy access of the customer to promote convenience, whilst home delivery could be promoted to those further away from stores.
Activating this data makes for much more engaging ads for Giant Eagle and helps drive conversions for the products stocked but it presents a lucrative opportunity for supplier brands too.
Smart Data Decisions From E-Commerce To Retail Media
Giant Eagle not only innovated through their own e-commerce marketing but then repurposed data and learnings into high-performing retail media campaigns for many of their supplier partners.
With brands looking to increase sales of their products and find new sources of quality first-party data, Leap Media, the retail media network established by Giant Eagle, represents an exciting opportunity.
Previously, activating campaigns with brands using Leap Media’s data would be susceptible to delays within the creative approvals process – resulting in missed opportunities to drive sales, especially around seasonal promotions.
Jivox IQ DaVinci is helping Giant Eagle scale our retail media network offering in three ways: A self-service activation portal for advertisers, sophisticated feed management and AI-Driven optimization algorithms that use first-party data to deliver performance.
– Joell Robinson, Giant Eagle Senior Director, Leap Media & Sales
That’s where Leap Media turned to Jivox IQ DaVinci to streamline the creative activation process and launch offer-based campaigns for CPG brands using their existing data plugged into Jivox. The team set up a variety of pre-approved creative templates that allowed supplier campaigns to be launched by simply selecting creative, the products to include in the promotion and sharing preview links. Retail media can often require a lot of ad-hoc manual work to get started but Jivox helps automate this process so retailers can scale.
This led to a 67% quicker turnaround for launching new offers and within their initial launch period the team was able to activate retail media campaigns across Leap Media’s network in a matter of minutes for over 15 supplier brands.
The team has also found their experience working with DCO naturally helps guide suppliers and get more sales out of each campaign, with Joell adding “For everything we do in retail media we use Giant Eagle and GetGo brand campaigns to test and learn so we know going into it that it’s a tactic we trust”.
