Background
Decathlon recently decided to bring its media buying in-house.
A primary ad server is essential to support this approach. It will provide a macro view of its campaigns to:
- See and measure each impression
- Understand and control its digital ecosystem
- Organize and centralize its partners
- Connect data, media and creative
- Personalize and centralize messages for easy updates
- Apply its business priorities
- Protect its data and campaign history.
Objectives and challenges
Decathlon is France’s leading sports goods retailer. This year, the company turned to ADventori for advice and technological solutions for advertising its many offers and promotional campaigns throughout the year.
By working closely with ADventori, Decathlon has successfully achieved its objective of personalizing its message to tailor its products and services to its online customers. The goal is to offer products that closely match the requirements of consumers and their environment, while also communicating key promotional events and sales campaigns.
Decathlon presented us with two major challenges: they wanted to streamline creative production costs while simplifying their online campaign launches.
Having our ad server in-house is key for Decathlon. The point of the control of our activations and their result is essential. ADventori has been working with us for several years now on these issues.
Aurélien Deschodt, Digital Communication Leader
Our services
- We act as campaign coordinator between all the companies involved in the brand’s digital communication (Tradelab, SLM, AdMySports, Ysance, etc.)
- We manage all trafficking and ad serving for all digital campaigns: first-party ad server
- We manage the UTM tags in the redirect chain (third-party technology integration), for campaign analysis in Analytics
- We advise on campaign scripting
- We launch campaigns in several formats: IAB, skin, native ad – display and mobile
- We automate the creation of banner ads to reduce creative costs and make campaign launches more fluid.
Our solutions
ADventori has addressed Decathlon’s strategic challenges by providing expertise and advice through service-based modules:
- Providing a dedicated team to support and execute Decathlon’s campaigns
- Organizing training and workshops to discuss working methods and setting up of campaigns
- Implementing and configuring tools to improve daily workflow with, for example, shared access to personalized and interactive backwards planning, showing how campaigns are progressing in real time
- Designing a meta-template for creatives
- Implementing Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) campaigns, integrating first-party data flows
- Carrying out quarterly reviews of campaign statistics.
Examples of scenarios
Geolocation
Geolocation is enabled for several scenarios, in particular to drive traffic to the brand’s multiple retail outlets.
The banner indicates the nearest store based on the user’s location, along with the availability date of Decathlon’s “VitalSport” discovery program.
Weather
Messages and featured products can also be tailored to the user’s local weather forecast.
This allows one product to be displayed when it’s raining, and another when it’s fine.
Affinity segments
Ads can also be personalized to the future buyer’s profile and preferences.
Products displayed are therefore different depending on whether the target is a woman or man, a football fan or tennis fan, etc.
DCO allows us to deliver the most relevant message to each of our targets, but also to gain agility and optimize all our actions on a daily basis .
Elodie Lukaszka, Traffic Manager
Results
- 207 campaigns launched since beginning to work with ADventori in 2016
- More than 363 million ad impressions since the beginning of 2019
- Campaign launch time reduced from one month to less than a week
Streamlined creative costs: a single creative capable of generating 1,605 banners thanks to a meta-template (VitalSport campaign).