Gautier Picquet, President of Publicis Media, and Arnaud Lauga, President of Publicis Commerce, explain why and how the group is focusing on retail.
JDN extension. Publicis, a communication group, is increasingly positioning itself in retail (acquisitions of Citrus Ad for retail media and Bizon for Amazon, joint venture with Carrefour, etc.). How come ?
Gautier Picquet. We have entered a new era of communication more connected to commerce, a “creative commerce revolution” as we call it Publicis. The acquisition of Bizon follows that of Profitero (SaaS platform for brand performance analysis on 700 e-commerce sites acquired in May, ed..) following the acquisition of CitrusAd. All of this should allow our clients to further link their investments and all their communication to a business dimension. All our activities (creative, media, data, technology) are aimed at the corporate sphere for brand growth. It’s also a way for us to support the explosion of e-retail media.
Arnaud Lauga. These acquisitions enable us to support brands in broader e-retail: strategy building consultancy, technologies that provide insights to fuel strategy, advertising distribution to retailers, media buying in audience extension, Amazon activations, inventory management, etc.
How much have you invested to position yourself in this retail transition ?
GP extension All I can tell you is that the e-retail means it is today the most structuring channel for brand investments in the United States. In France, it already represents 10% of media budgets. We must participate in this transformation of our customers’ marketing. This is why we are accelerating across the sphere of commerce and e-commerce. We created a joint venture with Carrefour a few weeks ago, which allows us to turn to e-retail. Bizon completes our offer by being a specialized agency on Amazon.
TO THE In fact, Bizon comes to bring us expertise dedicated to this very specific ecosystem on Amazon: how to manage inventory, product listings, which logistics to choose… You really need to know the platform well to use it well and position yourself there. , in France and in Europe.
The context we are going through pushes brands to focus on business results. At the same time, there is less and less data available for targeted advertising outside of Gafam, evidenced by the explosion of e-retail media. Advertising is changing its model ?
GP extension Our market is experiencing a new earthquake. After the search and social earthquakes, we are now experiencing the e-retail earthquake, which is transforming our businesses in a much more profound way than in the past. The reason is that it is redesigning all of our businesses: communication is connecting to the last meter of digital and corporate conversion, closer to consumers.
TO THE Retailers give us access to this first-party data that we’ve been looking for for years from our advertisers but that was very low volume, albeit rich. With retailers, wealth and volume go hand-in-hand, providing far more impact than we’ve been able to achieve thus far. The next big challenge in e-retail media is measurement. Because we must not forget that this channel is not only oriented towards the underlying logic of the funnel. We manage to rise thanks to targeting and different formats in audience extensions all over the web.
Where do you think the answer to this measurement challenge lies? ?
TO THE Opacity was still very present in this industry, but that is changing thanks to the arrival of communication agencies. This requires education and dissemination of good practices. The more budgets grow, the more advertisers want to measure the KING.