Initial situation
Intersport is one of the largest sporting goods retailers in the world. In Switzerland, headquartered in Bern, they have over 180 locations selling sporting goods from various sports and own brands. In addition, they have their own online shop at www.intersport.ch. DEPT® has been Intersport’s digital marketing partner since 2019.
Challenges
In order to generate more awareness and traffic for the Intersport website, more visibility for the individual co-brands such as McKinley and more frequency in the local shops, Intersport wanted a digital advertising campaign that could be extended to programmatic channels.
The challenge for DEPT® was to depict the different product categories (such as skiing) as well as all 13 brands with a wide variety of individual assets (images, logos, texts, videos) on five different banner formats. Another challenge was to turn the national campaign into a hyper-local campaign by dynamically adding local retailers. Specifically, the geographical location of a user was to be taken into account. If a potential customer was located in the area covered by one of the more than 180 Swiss Intersport branches, the logo and address of this branch was to be displayed on the advertising banner.
Last but not least, the campaign budget for the respective campaign flights of the individual brands needed to be utilised as efficiently as possible. An automated and simple solution was needed to avoid costly and time-consuming production and still fulfil all requirements.
What did we do?
To implement the campaigns efficiently, the DEPT® Programmatic team created several templates for Google Studio, Display & Video 360 and Campaign Manager 360 as a basis, creating a scalable setup from ad creation to targeting and ad delivery while respecting the visual identity of each brand. In the following, we explain the setup in sequence.
In a first step, our experts created a framework for the advertising media with interchangeable elements in Google Studio. In a second step, the ad content such as animations, images, logos and texts as well as the respective local retailers and the corresponding geo-locations and landing pages could then be imported via the implemented feed.
For the feed, the locations of the 180 retailers were matched and mapped with the geo-targeting options from Google Studio. For new campaigns with geo-targeting, only the corresponding lines needed to be added to the feed.
Three main thematic characteristics were defined for the target group for the various brands: Running, Outdoor and Snow. To do this, the team created three templates in DV360, each with different targetings, which were generated using Google Audiences (Affinity, In-market) and Categories. In addition, specific premium placements could optionally be used via private deals in the sports sector.
CM360 served as an interface between Google Studio (creative) and DV360 (media buying). This meant that only the five creatives had to be integrated there, which were then dynamically adjusted with the help of dynamic targeting keys. Here, too, all placements per brand could be created right from the start, so that only a few clicks were needed for setups.
With the work steps described above, our programmatic experts were able to efficiently create campaign setups with adverts/banners for all specific brands and target groups.
Working with DEPT® to build an automated solution has significantly increased the efficiency of our media budget for both Intersport and our partner brands.
Roger Riegendinger, Head of Category Management, Intersport Schweiz AG
Results
The measures taken by DEPT® reduced the time and effort required to create campaigns by 90%. Scalability was emphasised: among other things, feed changes could now be made in a matter of minutes, for example to activate additional brands. Thanks to simpler checking and optimisation, stronger performance in the upper funnel (awareness and traffic) was also guaranteed: the average CPM was reduced by 72%, while the CTR was 95% higher compared to previous campaigns that had been booked in the traditional way. Challenge mastered!
With this scalable setup, we were able to excellently meet the requirements from all three perspectives: traffic, efficiency and performance for Intersport.ch, brand and product visibility for the respective co-brands, digital presence for the local retailers.
Are you a multi-brand retailer like Intersport and would you like to run a campaign similar to this one for your partners? Do not hesitate to contact us if you are convinced by the flexibility and scalability of this data-based and dynamic approach.
Questions?
Head of GMP resellership
