French supermarket giant Carrefour and advertising group Publicis have launched a joint venture named ‘Unlimitail’ to tap into the booming retail media market in Europe, Brazil and Argentina.
The official launch of the company comes six months after the initiative was announced and was unveiled during VivaTech, Europe’s largest startup and technology conference held in Paris.
Retail Media is the fastest-growing channel for media spend, revolutionising traditional media hierarchies. Within the next two years, it is expected to overtake TV advertising spend for US consumer packaged goods companies.
Carrefour noted that until now, the fragmentation of the market in Europe and Latin America had made it difficult for all players to fully unlock its potential. While representing 85% of the e-commerce market in those territories, traditional retailers only attract 15% of retail media investments from brands. Carrefour said that this reducing revenue opportunities for retailers and is leaving brands with few, if no alternatives to walled-gardens, preventing them from reaching hundreds of millions of shoppers.
Unlimitail aims to bring to Europe and Latin America the same “scale, connectivity and consistency” that is enabling the retail media boom in the US. The company plans to combine the market’s most advanced technologies, ‘CitrusAd powered by Epsilon’, with Carrefour’s retail media expertise to build a “comprehensive media player that addresses the entire retail media value chain”.
In initial trials since the initiative was unveiled six months ago, Unlimitail has attracted 13 retail partners, representing more than 120 million loyalty customers and 1.5 billion pages viewed a month.
These include Kingfisher France, Groupe Galeries Lafayette, Rakuten France, Showroomprive Group, ÏDKIDS, LuisaViaRoma, MyOrigines, Bringo, Electra Group, Maquillalia, Juguetilandia, Public and two Carrefour franchise partners in Morocco (LabelVie) and Israël (Electra Consumer Products).
Unlimitail will be able to provide off-the-shelf monetisation solutions to retailers. For advertisers, the company says it offers direct access to premium inventories that generate the highest conversion rates and Return-On-Ad-Spend.
Alexandre Bompard, CEO of Carrefour, said: “With Unlimitail, we want to create a European giant in retail media, and one that has every chance of winning, because it already has the best technologies on the market. It’s a project that goes far beyond Carrefour and Publicis, and we hope to rally as many partners as possible.”
Arthur Sadoun, CEO of Publicis Groupe, added: “Our ambition with our new partners and the ones that will soon follow is to create a leading platform in retail media as simple as the open web. A platform driving scale, connectivity, and consistency in a media that is an increasingly crucial pillar of any brand’s business strategy.
“It is a critical milestone to help marketers take back control of their customer relationships, accelerate their readiness for a cookie-less world and deliver a successful media ROI, particularly in CPG.”
NAM Implications:
- Success in optimising retail media is increasingly about the quality of First Party Data…
- …and ease of access to targeted shoppers…
- …competing against increasingly sophisticated rivals…
- …and increasingly picky brand owners.
