Danone Levels Up Advertising Strategy with Data Collaboration

The Challenge

Global food and beverage leader Danone has been known for industry-leading innovation for more than 100 years. When the global pandemic triggered seismic consumer behavior shifts, Danone needed to act quickly to evolve its consumer intelligence capabilities. COVID had disrupted business and fundamentally changed media consumption habits, and Danone needed new insights to sharpen its media strategy, drive return on advertising investment, and build for the future.

Like most consumer packaged goods (CPGs), Danone lacked the first-party data and direct contact with its customers that retailers with brick-and-mortar and e-commerce storefronts enjoyed. The team needed a way to build a holistic view of their consumer in order to increase shopper intelligence, broaden reach, and personalize customer touchpoints. They also needed to be able to measure their efforts. Danone realized that this was not just an immediate need; the team wanted to develop a solution that could power a strategic, agile advertising program into the future. This meant the program would have to prepare for a post-cookie landscape while ensuring compliance with all consumer privacy regulations, including GDPR and CCPA.

The Solution

Danone engaged the data marketing experts at Numberly to tackle challenges using the /LiveRamp Data Collaboration Platform. Data collaboration with Danone’s retail partners could fill in the missing parts of the puzzle as it sought to build a holistic view of its customer. LiveRamp’s built-in proprietary privacy-enhancing technologies and advanced permissioning assists each party in maintaining a privacy-centric approach and better respecting consumer privacy choices at all times.

The team designed a test that would measure how well Danone’s digital advertising drove sales across multiple audience segments at one of its largest retailers and optimize campaign performance in real time across channels based on transaction-level data. The next step was to get the retailer to sign on. In the past that would have been an insurmountable obstacle, but Danone’s channel partner was quickly on board since the collaboration would happen in LiveRamp’s trusted platform, a secure environment where they could share and analyze consumer and transaction data without moving data or exposing PII.

All the pieces were now in place for Danone to run an experiment that would lay the groundwork for its larger goals of moving to post-cookie advertising and owning its data future.

The Results

By using RampID to accurately link shopper data while protecting privacy, the teams could analyze historical revenue performance with a level of precision and granularity that had never before been possible. This deep record-level modeling clearly illuminated opportunities to drop a poor-performing customer segment, merge two segments with highly correlated audience behaviors, and create two new segments that were promising. 

Numberly activated the segments directly from the LiveRamp Analytics Environment to achieve consistent audience definition and ensure they could accurately measure incremental impact across channels, beginning with Facebook and Google Display & Video 360. They were able to optimize the creative and bidding strategy for each segment to deliver targeted messages and maximize incrementality over the course of the campaign.

The test campaign achieved a significant boost in sales, with an incremental lift of 25% (spanning both online and offline channels). On the retailer’s website, where customers ordered ahead for pickup or delivery, visitors to the Danone product pages increased by over 22%. And the new audience segments revealed through data collaboration proved to be the highest-performing segments overall. 

Danone has rebuilt its marketing operations around the groundbreaking methods developed in the course of this test. It has developed the platform to power a strategic, measurable advertising program and grow sales. The innovative brand is now equipped to respond to new consumer insights with agility, expand the value of its data, strengthen retail partnerships, and build direct relationships with its most loyal consumers—all made possible by data collaboration.