In collaboration with Google Cloud
Across retail, financial services, tourism, and hospitality, organizations have amassed a wealth of customer data. This data can be analyzed and refined to create personalized content and value for each customer’s journey. With this fundamental asset in place, organizations with long-running loyalty programs have an opportunity to nurture, develop, and convert their data assets into value, revealing a whole new revenue stream. This strategy can support the future of these organizations and deliver on partner and customer expectations.
Data monetization paves the way to better business outcomes in an environment that is increasingly protective of personal data. One route to creating data-driven revenue is a custom media network. This requires organizations to develop a company-wide culture that is informed and comfortable with gathering and utilizing its most high-value asset—first-party data—while maintaining compliance.
Why is this important? The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has warned that regulatory changes, such as the eradication of cookies, "warrants an immediate re-evaluation of the ecosystem." Amid growing signal loss and greater calls for heightened privacy legislation, it’s more important than ever to find, know, engage, own, and retain first-party data, rather than acquire third-party data, which presents additional legal complexities.
With access to first-hand data on real people that can be acted upon securely from within, the retail, financial services, insurance, tourism, and hospitality sectors are all primed to grow data-driven revenue operations.
"Even with Chrome’s delay, the IAB estimates that the same changes on Safari and Firefox have led to a 50%-60% loss in signals already."
—Insider Intelligence
Custom media networks have seen immense success in retail. Now, opportunities abound for multiple sectors, including financial services, tourism, hospitality, and others. The key component to the success of any data monetization strategy, regardless of sector, is quality first-party experiences, where you can curate a cohort of partners and advertisers to add value. Herein lies the common ground with traditional loyalty programs. The difference is the role of technology like artificial intelligence and machine learning.
This ‘Brand as Platform’ approach allows brands to:
Brand as Platform allows partners to leverage data to include supply chain, order management, inventory, and insights for placement partners.
With every new data-driven experience comes more data, and a new layer of learning around the customer journey. This heightened level of engagement bolsters consumer trust and transparency, and opens the door to better performance, personalization, and orchestration capabilities.
Built on the foundation of giving the customer what they want, the hospitality sector is primed for success in data monetization. Why? Because it’s highly competitive and personal. Take hotels, for example. From kids-go-free offers to complimentary parking and unlimited Wi-Fi, it’s not unusual for hotels to provide added value with a stay. The hospitality sector already has large volumes of first-party data and the front-of-house talent in place to kickstart a monetization strategy for personalization that caters to guests.
Sam is traveling for work and checks in at HotelX the night before the conference is due to begin, getting information about the event from the friendly concierge. Sam has a severe nut allergy and makes this known to the server while sitting at the hotel restaurant. As the server inputs Sam’s order into their tablet, Sam reiterates his dietary requirements and feels at ease when the server shows him the customization has been logged on their device. When checking out, Sam gets a free coffee from the coffee shop run by a partner brand in the hotel lobby, just for downloading the HotelX app.
Six months later, Sam is back in the city for an urgent business meeting. While trying to find somewhere reliable to stay at a moment’s notice, Sam remembers HotelX, reserves a room, and makes a dinner reservation on the mobile app. On arrival, Sam uses the app to check in at one of the self-service points. Sam is given the same room as last time, which feels comfortable and familiar. In the dining room, the server notices it’s Sam’s second stay while inputting his room number into the tablet and then reminds him of the nut-free options on the menu, leaving Sam impressed.
A week later, Sam is back at his office. He hears from his boss that the company is looking for a new hotel partner as the company ramps up plans to grow in the city next year. So, he recommends HotelX. Meanwhile, the hotel chain recently carried out sentiment analysis to gather insights from social media, gauging performance and competition metrics. HotelX launches a timely low-cost campaign. When the internal communication about the new hotel tender goes out, hundreds of Sam’s colleagues around the country download the HotelX app. The next time Sam visits HotelX for business, he brings his partner along as it’s a longer trip than usual. Scrolling through the mobile app, he purchases an offer for the hotel spa which carries a range of products from a partner brand.
One popular American supermarket chain was looking for faster, higher-margin growth. Partnering with Publicis Sapient, they were able to provide a high-demand product to their CPG partners: first-party data. Combining this rare offering with ad space at the point of sale created an entirely new revenue stream for the retailer.
Publicis Sapient unified the retailer’s data across devices, activated audiences, and reached specific audience segments, moving away from an incremental revenue model to an in-house platform that leverages shopper incentives and loyalty data. Assessing the existing media offerings helped this regional retailer identify gaps across channels, technologies, and operations. Publicis Sapient built a three-year roadmap, achieving measurable success in just one quarter.
With the input of media experts across Publicis Groupe, the retailer received a comprehensive solution, integrating Google Analytics 4 and Google Cloud tools. The network’s new blueprint came complete with new capabilities across business operations, data planning and analysis, campaigns, channel strategy, and key platforms and integrations.
This retailer has already realized $100 million in revenue it otherwise would not have achieved without this data monetization strategy and is now on track to make data a $1 billion business line.
Publicis Sapient revealed a billion-dollar opportunity to monetize customer data held by one of America’s largest food retailers. The well-known drug and food retail giant embarked on a transformation thanks to its very own retail media network. This custom, omnichannel approach equipped the retailer with 360-degree customer insights, giving them the power to map out each customer’s journey.
To capture growing media revenue from CPGs, Publicis Sapient closed the loop on reporting with a direct path to sales that other ad and content platforms couldn’t provide. The system is optimized to deliver actionable, real-time insights with unprecedented transparency. Meanwhile, Publicis Media, a sister agency, unlocked unique perspectives on each advertiser’s needs, while existing relationships with Google Display Network enabled this leading retailer to get up and running quickly with proven processes. Partners across Publicis Groupe delivered deep expertise to the innovation and implementation of this profitable custom platform.
With the growing trend of at-home workouts, the iFIT fitness platform experienced triple-digit, ‘hockey-stick’ growth—even before the global COVID-19 pandemic. However, this growth also meant that their data was becoming increasingly diverse and complex as they scaled their offering globally.
“Building strong confidence in the data was key to the success of our organizational buy-in. Otherwise, they don’t trust and take action on the data. Having great data structure and up-front processes reduced tension between our business and data teams. Here’s the data. Here’s the flow of it. It doesn’t need to be this mystery sandbox.”
—Chase Brammer, CTO, iFIT
Discover how Google Cloud helped this leader in insurtech leverage analytics for happier customers.
“We operate like a tech company, very much at the frontier, in a traditional, data-heavy business. An advantage we believe we have is our ability to quickly query data, understand what’s going on with our customers and analyze their policy information as agilely as we can.”
—Christian Dulmaine, Business Intelligence Lead, Lemonade
Sharonyka Kumar
Group Vice President
Global Head of Google Practice at Publicis Sapient
sharonyka.kumar@publicissapient.com
To learn more about how our Customer Engagement offerings enable you to leverage customer data to attract new customers and build loyalty while transforming into a customer-centric organization, visit publicissapient.com/solutions/customer-engagement.
Publicis Sapient is a digital transformation partner helping established organizations get to their future, digitally enabled state, both in the way they work and the way they serve their customers. We help unlock value by applying a startup mindset and modern methods, fusing strategy, consulting, and customer experience with agile engineering and creative problem-solving. Digital pioneers with 20,000 people and 53 offices around the globe, our experience in technology, data sciences, consulting, and customer obsession—combined with our culture of curiosity and relentlessness—enables us to accelerate our clients’ businesses by designing the products and services their customers truly value. Publicis Sapient is the digital business transformation hub of Publicis Groupe. For more information, visit publicissapient.com.
First Steps Toward Data Monetization
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