Cartology is the exclusive retail media partner for clients to connect with Woolworths Group’s 14.5 million Everyday Rewards members. In this article, Tom Windeyer shares how the business is able to communicate and engage with customers along the path to purchase.
Advertising and marketing are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Clients are becoming more attuned to customer needs, with their expectations growing, while retail media with its rich customer focus has emerged as a formidable opportunity.
Retail media allows clients to harness a customer franchise engrained in trusted relationships, leverage first-party data to power targeting and measurement, and connect with customers through contextually relevant moments on their shopping journey.
At Cartology, we’re pioneering retail media in Australia, powered by the Woolworths Group and we’re helping brands and property partners realise this opportunity.
100% customer-led
Retail out-of-home screens, powered by the smarts of retail media connect with the right customers in the context of their shopping journey, enabling a better in-centre experience and commercial outcomes. It’s data-driven precision with the customer in mind.
When customers are met with contextually relevant messaging that resonates with their category needs, or brand choices, paired with dynamic and attention-grabbing creative, we move beyond ads to rich and engaging content that’s informative and inspiring. This is where we forge connections between brands, centre partners and customers.
Rhodes Shopping Centre, NSW
Not all screens are created equal
The opportunity for brands to stand out and cut through with relevant messaging at a high frequency remains incredibly powerful across fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) and non-FMCG categories. With the help of first-party data from Woolworths and Everyday Rewards, we too can recognise the diversity in audience behaviours across local and neighbourhood centres, medium to large occasion-based centres and the expansive realm of regional shopping centres.
In local and neighbourhood centres, we see 71% of shoppers visit these centres one to three times per week(1), while local shopping centres account for almost 50% of grocery purchases among premium buyers(10). We can then look at the attitudes, behaviours and intentions of premium buyers outside of the Woolworths ecosystem at a category level (eg. automotive, banking, travel) to drive a more meaningful and targeted reach for brands.
The ability to understand customers within the store and their attitudes and intentions beyond the store environment allows brands to forge deeper connections and get closest to customers across their shopping journey.
The in-centre experience remains essential for customers
Across the Woolworths Group, online behaviour continues to grow with an average weekly traffic growth of 25.2% across food and everyday digital platforms year on year(3). Despite the growth in online, in-store remains a crucial part of our customer experience, with approximately 88% of Woolworths food retail sales originating in store(4).
For me, there’s still a clear need from customers for the connection, accessibility and theatre of the in-store environment and retail destinations. We’re continually looking for ways to meet customer needs and enhance their experience in-store while giving brands the opportunity to connect. The recent digitisation of our stores is a primary example of this.
Through exclusive customer insights, we know that 68% notice or engage with retail media while shopping for health and beauty products. Furthermore, one in three are seeking information about how to find the right product for them(6). For our customers, we want to be that source of information and education, thus we leveraged our screens expertise to digitise the health and beauty aisles of more than 400 Woolworths stores nationally.
With the scale of our business, and more than 4,000 digital retail screens nationally, we’re committed to the retail and customer experience. We’re a part of the shopper journey. We’re inspiration, information and a platform for real connections.
Retail out of home just got better with the smarts of retail media. We want to share that with our partners.
This article features in the latest issue of SCN Magazine.
Source: Kantar, Unlocking Retail Research, October 2022 (n=1,000)
2. Big Movers 2023: Regional Renaissance: A Rise in Migration to Regional Australia (Page 17)
3. Woolworths Digital metrics. First quarter sales results, 25.10.2023.
4. Woolworths Food Retail (Stores and eCom) sales performance by business. First Quarter Sales Results, 25.10.2023.
5. abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/regional-population/latest-release
6. Cartology Category Research, Health and Beauty 2022.
8. Quantium Checkout Data: 15.3.2023 – 12.9.2023
9. Woolworths transaction data: 2.3.2021 – 21.2.2023 (last 104 weeks), 1 week discrete.Google Data Platform – Woolworths Data Lake
10. Quantium Checkout Data: 05.04.2023 – 03.10.2023
