20-Michel Bellanger(Carrefour Media)et Vihan Sharma(LiveRamp)-Marketing Remix by VIUZ

Hello everyone, my name is Vihan Sharambant. France also acts as accompanied by Michel Bélanger at Carrefours Aux Médias to present how distributors today work with brands to improve the consumer experience, Michel, welcome. Thank you, and I'll let you introduce yourself.

Thank you for having me. I think I'm the last retailer to speak today, perhaps, but it's proof that retail media is probably a formidable medium. I find this dynamism in this vertical very interesting for brands, whether non-food or food. Something is happening. I have been managing the marketing of the advertising division since 2011. Before we get into the subject, I'll share a bit about what we do at Carrefour Links. We are a company that is a connector, a data-based platform, to allow advertisers to activate campaigns on different channels and touchpoints. Today we allow our advertisers to activate campaigns in a premium universe like Facebook, Google, and YouTube. At the same time, they have the ability to use the same platform to activate campaigns in digital tools like Act Nexus or other DSPs in the country that exist in the market. Thanks to this connectivity, we allow our advertisers to improve all touchpoints with their own customers.

Now that we understand a little about what we do at Carrefour Links, the first question for you, Michel: can you share with us the different data sets you have and how you built this customer knowledge?

This is rather the speech that Stefan Guay Lissier, who is the Chief Data Officer and who apologizes for not being able to be here today, should have given. To make it short, it's a little history lesson for the data part. Carrefour has more than 6,000 points of sale in France, evenly distributed across the territory, from which 3 million visits per day are recorded at each checkout. This means we collect receipts and then offer customers a loyalty program. Beyond the receipt data, you can imagine the granularity with which we can ultimately collect purchases, down to the barcode of the product, the small bottle of water. We were able to associate these receipts with individuals via their loyalty cards. From these loyalty cards, we were able to obtain consumer information that allowed us to track purchases over time and therefore better know our customers to ultimately offer them the best products. On one hand, we knew their desires and intentions, and then imagine how to better organize the store—that's the second subject. And thirdly, we can also imagine personalization since we know them better, we are able to communicate with them better. So the third type of data that exists is all media data, and media data ultimately comes from the Carrefour space initially. And then there is all the data probably that has been talked about since this morning that exists somewhere and that it is also necessary to be able to associate with our customers to say that if we want to know them better, it is necessary to better know what they did in the past, what they bought, and also imagine their desires, what they want to do tomorrow, in order to offer, according to what they consume and what they buy, perhaps to better support their projects.

And then we talk a lot about collaborations between distributors and brands. Today, can you share with us what your philosophy is, how you work with different brands to develop the new consumer experience?

There was already Edouard Dinichert for Amazon, Arnaud Saint Pastou for Fnac Darty, who explained a bit the role of an advertising division within a brand. For our part, in the same vein, our job is to monetize the media and data assets of Carrefour. The objective is to offer brands the ability to regain control of in-store communication. We had an excellent example with Microsoft, which ultimately found a very strong benefit in being able to accompany its customers to the last meters at the point of sale to better convince them. So if our non-food advertisers are doing absolutely extraordinary things outside the store, I think it's important to extend this support inside the store to better convert, and then naturally for our customers, it's about offering perhaps a slightly nicer shopping journey. For those who do their shopping at Carrefour, it's not necessarily the best moment of the week. So we can imagine livening up this shopping journey, simplifying, offering more personalization, and then especially benefits—whether transactional, relational—or offering new services. And today, it's precisely this information, this customer knowledge, that allows us to address the right message, the right service, to the right person.

And what can you share with us about a concrete example that you are currently implementing with a brand and audience?

I like to go back to basics. When we respond to our clients and food brands, there is something extraordinary: on one hand, they have a business that is more and more, still very physical in France. For a food brand, the business is 95% offline sales. Yet the same individual, the person who buys, is increasingly consuming digital media. So there are two worlds that need to be connected. The advertisers' question is: how can I communicate and interact with my buyers, who are increasingly digital, and ultimately offer them to buy products well in physical stores? How do I bring these two worlds together? So the job we did was to give advertisers the possibility to make this link between digital and physical sales, allowing them to better invest their media investments and especially to calculate the ROI, the measurement of effectiveness of the marketing investment, to ultimately develop the digital marketing budget, in any case to rationalize it and better coordinate it with the rest of what can be done. Here we are talking about the marketing budget, so that means media, also CRM, and also promotion. All of this: promotion must become targeted, CRM measurable, and media also measurable and targeted. A concrete example: I like to take the case of a brand of alcohol—not by personal affinity obviously, that would be a bit vain, I think. So it's a brand: Bacardi Martini, with whom we worked to target buyers of white rum in the last three months. We targeted these buyers on digital inventories for eight weeks. After this media action, we followed during the campaign, during the eight weeks, and after the campaign for eight weeks, to see between those who had been exposed and those who had not been exposed to the messages if there had been additional sales. What we observed by offering simply visibility to these buyers—who then had a bottle in their bar, a recipe hosted on Carrefour.fr for mojitos and free cocktails, maybe we'll get into the details—we observed that during the campaign there was a 15% increase in sales, and after the campaign there was a 50% increase in sales. You might say it's strange: I stop, I cut the tap, and it continues to increase. It's very simple; we return to extremely basic things for two reasons. The first is that we return to what the product lifecycle is. Digital is a tool that influences sales, so we return to a marketing logic. We talk about product lifecycle: when you have a bottle in the bar, it takes time to finish it before buying another one. And a priori, the role of advertising for food brands is perhaps to accelerate the product cycle, so perhaps to have a role of product destruction rather than just reacting and buyers buying. That's the first point. The second point: we were talking about individuals. The real insight we were able to share with the brand is that we talked about individuals, not necessarily cookies. So we returned to fairly essential things: how many people have I reached and how many people will buy? Have I increased the average basket? And this is a real discussion that engages both marketing and media, and which has opened a very nice collaboration.

13.0 Is that okay? Fine. Today you were talking about measurement, and we talk a lot about ROAS. I know you have another way of seeing things. Can you share this vision of measurement, how you see it at your place?

To be very pragmatic in the different campaigns we have run, we often talk about ROAS and it's a real subject: how do we measure search online and purchase offline? In our case, when we are in the food environment, search online is very complicated. Who among you—I'll ask you to raise your arm—who among you, when you do your grocery shopping, took care before going to the store to search for information online about the brands in your cart? So we are not necessarily representative. I insist that means nothing, it doesn't mean anything. However, what we observed is that our customers massively did not do this exercise of searching for information. And therefore, buying digital does not necessarily have to be performance-based, i.e., having the obligation to create a click to send to a website, etc. We set ourselves the objective of imagining that digital works ultimately like television. I love television. I think digital works exactly the same way, and that's what we show in our effectiveness measurements: our customers are able to make decisions in real time on Monday and Tuesday, but unfortunately they come to do their shopping on Friday. So probably between digital and physical, it's necessary on one hand to have the information to know how to bring them together, how to act as close as possible to the purchase act. And then ultimately, is it possible to generate advertising recall, not necessarily a click, so advertising support—meaning visibility—to generate the brand awareness that ultimately cultivates favorable ground for conversion when in the store? And that's ultimately what all brands do outside the store with TV, radio, all traditional media: they create this favorable ground. And we want to contribute to converting it better in the store. I speak for us, but I think it's all retailers who do this job today. And we are absolutely convinced that it is the most effective solution. So at Carrefour, for food brands, we don't believe much in ROAS. On the other hand, we think more about VOPS, i.e., view online, purchase offline, which has a fairly significant impact on several things. First, visibility is an essential criterion. And if we talk about visibility, that means we need to be able to create sufficient pressure to hope for advertising recall. That means the notion of people-based becomes very, very important. We don't sell products to devices; we sell them to individuals. And I think in a logic of investment optimization, it's necessary to have this visibility on individuals and the way we distribute the money over a number of individuals.

The last question: how do you position yourself compared to other players in the digital ecosystem? We hear a lot about GAFA and the GAFA, often it's a difficult relationship. But how do you position yourself against these guys?

We love them, and we even cherish them. I'm not joking, I'll explain why. If you take a little of Carrefour's history, I am absolutely convinced that if Carrefour today has the positioning and the place it has as a leader in food, it's probably because for years they did an absolutely incredible job that will seem bizarre to you: they bought audience in the physical world. Buying audience in the physical world means investing in stores—it's called real estate. And then the digital world arrived. When we talk about digital transformation and the completion of something, perhaps the purchase of audience has transformed a bit. You can't buy something once and then make it profitable for years; you have to be in competition every day. So today, beyond the investments needed to acquire this audience in the digital world, it's necessary to regain control of customer knowledge to better execute it externally. So probably Carrefour today—and we hope we contribute to playing this role for brands—we must offer qualified audience to brands, and we must offer this qualified audience across all media spaces, whether that's Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon—not yet, but I want to see that with Edouard, though I sense a bit of reluctance. Anyway, I think our job is to be able to find our audience wherever it is to offer them a purchasing experience and develop something that adds value for the entire ecosystem, and especially first and foremost for the brands.

Thank you very much, Michel. Thank you, and see you soon.

Thank you.