Activating first-party data via retail media, benefiting e-commerce.
Giant Eagle is a regional grocery retailer also operating in the convenience space with 470 locations across the United States. As the team brought media buying in-house, with a goal of providing the best advertising experience for customers and partners alike, they realized the opportunity ahead of them to deliver better results for supplier partners through their wealth of first-party data: retail media.
How did Giant Eagle scale personalization with automation?
Efficient creative versioning through automation.
Before coming to DaVinci Commerce, scaling personalized marketing campaigns was a challenge where each creative was a manual build requiring a custom template.
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, helping them personalize across the customer journey from in-store to on-site (or vice-versa) in a scalable manner.
With DaVinci Commerce, 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 a 54% uplift in CTR on average across campaigns launched through DaVinci Commerce.
Our creative bandwidth was stretched with an onus on partners to generate copy, product images and deliver assets. 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.
Fresh & relevant offers driven by first-party & contextual data.
“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 DaVinci Commerce 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 that with extensive first-party data plus outside signals like geolocation and weather conditions in an area. Campaigns could then dynamically showcase relevant products and offers based on customer needs:
- Loyalty campaigns spoke to customers on a 1:1 level: products browsed or abandoned in the cart re-shown with messaging adjusted by loyalty status.
- Made-to-order food and drinks from the GetGo business surfaced based on location, time of day, and weather-based signals.
- Curbside pickup options shown to customers within easy reach of a store, while home delivery promoted to those further away.
Seasonal MyPerks variations, automatically versioned from a single template, fed by live product data.
Smart data decisions from e-commerce to retail media.
Giant Eagle not only innovated through their own e-commerce marketing. They repurposed the 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.
That's where Leap Media turned to DaVinci Commerce to streamline the creative activation process and launch offer-based campaigns for CPG brands using their existing data plugged into DaVinci Commerce. The team set up a variety of pre-approved creative templates that allowed supplier campaigns to be launched by simply selecting creative, choosing the products to include, and sharing preview links. Retail media can often require a lot of ad-hoc manual work to get started, but DaVinci Commerce helps automate this process so retailers can scale.
This led to a 67% quicker turnaround for launching new offers, and within the 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.
“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,” Joell added.
DaVinci Commerce is helping Giant Eagle scale our retail media network offering…[with] AI-Driven optimization algorithms that use first-party data to deliver performance.
Joell Robinson, Giant Eagle Senior Director, Leap Media & Sales
The full stack behind the campaign.
Channels
- Display
- Video
- Retail Media
- CTV
Dynamic Elements
- Product Images
- Background Images
- Offer Copy
- Pricing
- CTA
Data Triggers
- Retargeting
- Loyalty Data
- Geolocation
- Weather
- Time of Day
Looking to scale your campaigns with automated personalization?
Bring your product feed and audience data. We'll show you how DaVinci Commerce activates the same first-party signals Giant Eagle uses to power retail media, in your environment, on your timeline.
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