Douglas expands its retail media offering in online retail with new advertising formats for brand and product advertising. The new advertising options enable brands to target interested customers on Europe’s leading premium beauty platform early on in their product search and decision-making process – right where they ultimately buy. In order to achieve this, Douglas works with Criteo, the technology company for trustful and effective advertising. Brands can run Audience Ads campaigns in the browser-based web store as well as in the Douglas mobile web application.

Several million Ad Impressions already during Christmas shopping season

Even before Black Friday 2020, Douglas went live with the Audience Ads offering on its German marketplace and tied in selected partners for the Christmas shopping season. A total of 21 brands promoted their fragrances, skincare and makeup products on the homepage and category pages of the online store with Audience Ads formats. In the first five weeks, several million ad impressions were delivered. The market share of the advertised products increased by an average of 11% during the campaign period and conversion rates by an average of 57%. Following this successful launch, Douglas integrated Criteo’s retail media technology into its backend in the spring of 2021, giving the retailer more creative freedom in its advertising offering and deeper insights into the success of its brand partners’ campaigns.

Individual premium ad formats and targeting options

Brand partners benefit not only from the enormous reach of the Douglas platform, but also from new display advertising formats designed individually for Douglas for their various objectives along the marketing funnel and for different occasions. These include formats such as the Product Slider, which promotes up to 15 products of a brand, the Split Teaser as a combination of branding and product display, or the Category Spotlight within the product overview pages. Douglas’ follow-the-user approach also allows brands to address interested shoppers across different categories. In the future, real-time surfing data such as searches or product detail page views, purchase history, the contextual environment, and the Douglas DMP will come into play in target group targeting.

Full Funnel and scalable

In 2019, the premium beauty platform initially launched Sponsored Products advertising on its product overview pages, as well as offsite campaigns using Douglas’ own DMP and exclusive first-party data into the retail media market. “The Audience Ads offering, developed in partnership with Criteo, now enables full-funnel onsite campaigns and improves the transition from offsite to onsite,” said Matthias Brock, head of retail media at Douglas: “The new options perfectly complement our current onsite offering. With Audience Ads, we have worked with Criteo to develop a variety of flexible premium ad formats that inspire shoppers especially at the beginning of the buying phase and in the product selection process. In combination with our innovative targeting approaches, brands can address individual brand audiences along the entire customer journey, attract attention and convince them to buy, coupled with transparent measurement of success during and at the end of the campaign.”

“Today, consumers find increasingly inspiration for products that match their interests and preferences directly when browsing on retailer pages, without necessarily going through a search engine. Getting users excited about their own products and brands on the retailer’s site at this early stage of the purchase decision is highly interesting for brands,” explains Robert Kießling, director retail media supply DACH, Criteo: “Criteo’s retail media formats provide real added value not only for brands, but also for online shoppers looking for product inspiration, and thus optimally support retailers in tapping the full potential of their audiences.”

As part of its transformation to a commerce media platform, Criteo is focused on helping its clients manage, activate and monetise their first-party data. The retail media business plays a key role in this. In Germany, the technology company implements Criteo Retail Media solutions for Intersport, myToys, Notebooksbilliger.de and the Douglas subsidiary parfumdreams.de, among others.