For several years now, excitement has been building around retail media and what it will unlock: new revenue streams for retailers, better experiences for customers, high-intent audiences and closed-loop attribution for advertisers. But is all that actually happening yet?
The short answer is yes. The longer answer is, yes, in cases where the retail media network’s capabilities are well-matched to the advertiser’s needs. One such case was a recent campaign Serta Simmons Bedding ran with the Sam’s Club Member Access Platform (MAP).
The partners took Retail TouchPoints behind the scenes of the campaign — not just the results ($7 return on ad spend!), but more importantly the process, shedding light on not only what makes retail media so powerful, but also what’s required to succeed in this emerging advertising channel.
The Challenge: Slowing Sales and Long Purchase Cycles
A mattress isn’t something people buy every day, or even every year for that matter. In fact, the average purchase cycle is around seven to 10 years. Add to that the fact that “during COVID, we had a lot of mattress purchases that got pulled forward because people were spending so much time at home,” said Kimberly Hall, VP of Sales for Sam’s Club and Walmart at Serta Simmons Bedding.
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As a result, “our industry was starting to slow down a little bit,” said Hall in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “We were looking to see how we could reach the Sam’s Club member in new and different ways.”
The final challenge: Serta sells mattresses both in clubs and online at Sam’s Club, although as one might expect for a high-consideration product like a mattress, more purchases happen in-store. But Hall wanted to increase awareness and consideration both online and offline through online advertising as well as tracking the performance of the campaign across all of Sam’s Club’s sales channels.
The Solution: A Sponsored Video Campaign
The MAP team had just launched a new ad product — sponsored videos — that it pitched to Hall as an ideal solution. Hall agreed and the Serta team created a video ad designed to give Sam’s Club members a virtual chance to “feel” the quality and comfort of its mattresses.
“You don’t buy a mattress every week, so you want to have an opportunity to touch and feel it and get a sense for it,” said Ryan Burns, Head of Strategy at Sam’s Club MAP in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “Even more than a picture, that’s what video did for this campaign.”
As an added bonus, Serta had just relaunched its iconic Sheep character, so the videos were able “to bring that back to the Sam’s member as well,” said Hall. “He’s a feel-good icon and we’re celebrating his 25th birthday next year, so he’s been with us for a long time.”
The videos were placed in search results on the Sam’s Club website and targeted based on MAP’s four decades of member data, including information on transactions, searches and store visits. The campaign was timed for spring, a growth period for not just greenery but also mattress sales.
Positively Dreamy Results
The numbers speak for themselves:
- 3.2 million impressions;
- Attributed sales of $2.4 million; and
- A $7 return on ad spend (ROAS).
And according to Burns, these kind of results aren’t uncommon with MAP: “A $7 ROAS is terrific, but for MAP campaigns, whether it’s isolated to one product or [more of a] full-funnel, holistic approach, we see a 19% average sales lift for our suppliers, and about a 28% sales lift for new items that are launched with MAP.”
The How: Data and Collaboration
In accounting for the campaign’s success, Burns pointed first to Sam’s Club’s biggest differentiator — its membership model, “which gives us a relationship with our members and insight into our members that is really unique in the retail media network environment,” he said.
Sam’s Club’s four decades of historical data on its members is already more robust than many other retailers’ because every shopper is identified, both in clubs and online, and always has been. This also makes it easier for Sam’s Club to do something that other retailers are still struggling to offer their advertisers — link online ad impressions to in-store sales.
“We are able to take the ads that individuals see online and attribute those to in-club sales,” said Burns. “In this particular scenario with Serta, there may have been individuals who saw the Serta sponsored video ads online and didn’t purchase it right away, but if they went into the club to put their hand on that mattress, we still can connect those dots for our supplier partners. That’s incredibly important when we think true return on investment, return on ad spend — it’s metrics and measurement all the way through. With every transaction we understand our members and know them because of that membership card they have and the investment they choose to make up front with us.”
Sam’s Club is now expanding its capabilities even further, with offerings in offsite channels like CTV and in stores via initiatives like its recently announced Scan & Go ad offering.
“There are no transactions that we miss at MAP when it comes to our members, both online and in club,” said Burns. “The offering we have is based in that model of membership, that deep relationship. [Because of that] we always want it to be an additive experience for the member, which also means that we are very hands-on and very thoughtful [about how we roll out these ad experiences].”
Another key success factor for Hall has been the deep level of collaboration she enjoys with the MAP team. “Without that collaboration between the vendor and the retailer, you don’t necessarily get the most effective campaigns,” she said. “Some of the other national retailers that I’ve worked with, they just want our ad dollars, but they’re not necessarily as concerned about the ROAS at the end of the campaign. Our business partner on the MAP team has been a phenomenal partner. She continues to bring us new opportunities, offering us different types of media, different types of campaigns. And she’s done a really great job of getting us exposure that we wouldn’t necessarily have had in the past and bringing new ideas to us. It’s more of a collaborative effort than what I’ve seen with some of my other retail partnerships.”
According to Burns, this level of partnership with MAP advertisers is possible because of the curated nature of the Sam’s Club assortment: “Our member comes to Sam’s Club and says, ‘I’m going to make an investment in you because I expect disruptive value across product categories.’ So we have very high standards for the products that we put in club, which allows us to partner deeply with all of our supplier partners, Serta being a top-tier example of what that kind of deep, intimate partnership looks like. We have a limited, secure environment, which means we have a limited supplier base in terms of endemic suppliers, but that allows us to do a lot more with each of those suppliers and allows us to really leverage our data.”
Learn more about the evolution of retail media and how to capture the potential of this burgeoning advertising channel in our recent report, On-Site, Off-Site, In-Store: New Best Practices for the Evolved Retail Media Landscape. Download it here for free.
