How Publicis' Epsilon PeopleCloud Helps Smucker's ID Its Customers and Tailor Messages to Them

Note: To make sense of what is quickly becoming a vast and complex agency technology ecosystem, Adweek is reporting on each of the major platforms. This story is the fourth in a series covering agencies’ audience management platforms. Previously, Adweek reported on Omnicom’s Omni, Horizon Media’s blu. and Havas’ Converged. Most people know The J.M. Smucker Company, but that doesn’t mean they buy Smucker’s products every time they head down the store aisle. Amid fierce competition on the shelves, Smucker’s wants to gain market share. It does this, according to Jessica Fair, Smucker’s director of integrated consumer experience, by figuring out how it can be more relevant to more people. Publicis’ marketing platform Epsilon PeopleCloud underpins the entire strategy. The strategy revolves around achieving what Fair calls “relevant reach,” which is essentially combining precision marketing with brand marketing efforts. Smucker's needs to know who its consumers are, where they are and the best ways to connect with them. “We know that if we deploy the right messaging to the right consumers we can drive both brand and category growth,” said Fair. PeopleCloud is one of several audience management platforms that major agencies either bought or built. Publicis acquired Epsilon for $4.4 billion in 2019 and, with it, the infrastructure that supports the platform—namely, Epsilon's wealth of consumer data that allows media planners across the Publicis Media network to create and activate media across detailed audience segments. Publicis Groupe Leads Forrester’s Global Marketing Services Report Publicis’ center Epsilon is a powerful tool because of the scope of its data. It has “real data” on actual consumers, across all channels and on the open web, and doesn’t just extrapolate information from panel data, according to Joe Doran, Epsilon chief product officer. That real data includes consumer transactional data amounting to over $15 trillion, plus Epsilon’s own first-party data accumulated over its 30 years in business. It also supports third-party data integration and can connect that data with CORE IDs to augment audience insights. The data broker anchors personally identifiable information (PII) to a CORE ID—a code that anonymizes that PII. It has data on 200 million real people in the U.S. that brands can reach. “We have the highest match rates in the industry and we're consistently seeing 75%-plus match rates to real individuals—not just emails, not just device IDs,” said Doran. The platform actually reaches 85% of the individuals it targets, he added. Moving upstream Smucker’s saw the platform in action once it inserted PeopleCloud into its strategy workflow. It now uses the platform to determine audience sizes, explore different consumer sets and study consumer behavior. PeopleCloud identified who Smucker's consumers actually are and finds the right moments to connect with them, which sheds light on which media the brand should execute. To get the insights Smucker’s needs, planners must mine PeopleCloud data for audience data at the very beginning of their strategy process. Before PeopleCloud, the brand would go through an entire marketing process—hold the creative briefing, build the campaign, hold a media briefing—before finally working on targeting and activation. Flipping the workflow helps Smucker’s create more informed, effective creative based entirely on its understanding of its audience. The brand is currently testing a dynamic creative approach within the platform. “We're doing some dynamic creative testing based off of different cohorts and making sure that it's the most relevant message at the right time. I think that's a big opportunity for the future,” said Fair. It has no plans for one-to-one execution, though, because it mostly sells products on store shelves. Smucker’s realized the most significant change in campaign interaction from so-called “switchers," or disloyal consumers who select a Smucker's product approximately every third time they buy peanut butter, fruit spreads, ice cream toppings or syrups. The brand wants to convince those switchers to select Smucker's every time. PeopleCloud revealed insights about the disloyal audience segment that led those consumers to engage more with Smucker's campaigns, which Fair said will help it close its brand loyalty gap. Epsilon PeopleCloud enables marketers to understand the number of people they can reach, based on Epsilon’s people-based IDs. Total integration In a platform demo shared with Adweek, the platform shows the number of people in a specific segment. A planner can click a button and send that segment to one of PeopleCloud's approximately 400 partners. Its directly integrated with The Trade Desk, Google DV360, Verizon and Facebook and uses Epsilon technology to serve media across 396 additional vendors that partner with LiveRamp. Epsilon integrates its CORE IDs with its partners, so that every time it pushes out a campaign, planners can view the match rate and estimate the broadest possible reach a marketer could achieve. It can also ingest a client’s entire first-party data and then match that data with its own—meaning that it can build out comprehensive understanding of a brand’s loyal customers, down to what they buy. It can, for example, determine the amount of consumers a brand could consider active, inactive or lapsed. This helps brands improve specific areas in the marketing funnel. For a client in the entertainment space, PeopleCloud showed Adweek an example where inactive and lapsing audiences represented the middle of the funnel. The platform found that a brand’s lapsing customers still consumed online media about its category. That information helped the brand understand that those so-called lapsed consumers were still interested in its products—it just needed to get them back on its websites. Marketers can build audience-specific media plans within PeopleCloud to better visualize budget allocations. Integrations with DSPs like The Trade Desk or retail media networks make it possible for planners to easily move from strategy to activation within the technology’s parameters. The platform is inherently flexible, allowing Smucker's and its supporting Publicis team to recommend integrations with new partners as needed. Achieving scale Other media networks like Omnicom Media Group and Horizon Media rent data from third parties. By contrast, Epsilon sells its data, meaning that it actually coexists with other holding companies’ platforms. In this way, Publicis can still capture a piece of a client’s marketing investments regardless of whether it ever wins a review. “You don't have to be a Publicis client to use Epsilon PeopleCloud,” said Doran. Even though WPP is Walgreens’ agency of record, Publicis provides a range of digital services for the brand, including managing its white-labeled retail media network offering and its clean room environment from within PeopleCloud. The company sells its data directly to marketers, but if those marketers want other holdcos outside of the Publicis network to have access to the platform, Epsilon supports that. It also works with marketers’ in-house agencies and trains them on how to use the platform themselves. “It's been great to go back to the CPG clients and the other clients that I had when I was at Publicis and say, ‘See, we have the answer now.’ We can help expand your vision in the U.S. and then, increasingly, internationally,” said Kate Sirkin, evp, global data partnerships at Epsilon. Not All Customer Data Is Equally Valuable