Managed Audience: Coop puts its data expertise at your disposal

On Thursday, Coop welcomed more than 270 business partners and agency representatives to the "Coop Retail Media Update 2022" at the Congress Center in Basel. With this event, Coop wanted to familiarize those present with its large portfolio of offers in the area of retail media. "A lot of digital campaigns today are played out via agencies, which is why it's important for them to see what we can do and how we think," said Thomas Schwetje, Head of Marketing and Digital Services at Coop.

As one of the major media marketers in Switzerland, Coop plans to hold the event every two to three years in the future. At the first "Coop Retail Media Update," the Basel-based retailer also presented an innovation. With the "Managed Audience" product, Coop wants to deliver the "best target groups" to its partners from now on. "We are very close to consumer behavior with our stores and online worlds," explained Schwetje, who will head the newly formed Digital & Customer directorate as of 2023.

New target group approach

For example, if a customer such as Feldschlösschen wants to target only people on a media portal for a campaign who have recently bought beer or viewed a barley juice online at Coop, the retailer can now provide such data, anonymized and in compliance with data protection laws. "We also have information on a vegetarian target group, for example, or we know all about diaper shoppers," says the head of marketing at Coop. In total, the retailer has background information on more than 5.4 million people.

For this product, Coop is building on its extensive marketing infrastructure. "We developed everything ourselves," Schwetje reveals to Werbewoche.

With "Managed Audience," the data of a desired and previously precisely defined target group is made available to the media agency of a Coop partner in anonymized form. In this way, this special group of people can be reached with the help of suitable advertising directly on the media portals, for example, of Watson, 20 minutes and Viewbut also via YouTube and other digital platforms. To this end, the company has entered into cooperation with various media companies. The new product was tested with various partners.

Initially, Managed Audience will only be available to companies that have at least one product listed with the retailer. However, Thomas Schwetje can imagine offering the innovation to other, external companies such as banks or insurance companies in the future.

Merging offline data literacy with the digital world

"We anticipate a considerably large demand from our partners here," says the 52-year-old. Google and Facebook have certain search and usage data of their customers, but Coop has much more extensive information of its stationary and logged-in clientele, especially on specific purchasing behavior, he says. "We have a very comprehensive knowledge of our customers," reveals Adrian Steiger, Head of Digital Services at Coop. On the one hand, this is based on purchases made in Coop stores. On the other hand, 130 million sessions are recorded each year via coop.ch and the Supercard app, which provide extensive insights into online usage behavior.

"Managed Audience" may not be the biggest product innovation in Coop's history, "but it's something we're very proud of," Steiger smiles. It is a new way of addressing target groups in the digital environment. It's all about relevance, the data analytics expert emphasizes. Everyone would benefit from this innovation: The customers, because in the future they will only see things that are really relevant to them, but also the business partners, who could use their budgets so much more effectively. "At its core, it's about merging offline data expertise with the digital world," is how the 43-year-old Coop man sums up "Managed Audience."