Performance digital marketing campaigns.

Vilebrequin is a high-end French brand making, among other things, swimwear and ready-to-wear for women, men and children. Colourful, bold designs mark the creations of this company, founded in 1971 in Saint-Tropez.

Strategy - Putting our performance cycle method in place.

A media plan fed by data science.

At bright, when we run data science projects, the aim is always to arrive at something with concrete lessons for the client’s acquisition campaigns. In Vilebrequin’s case, we identified important things about the profile of the brand’s customers, which we used to improve the campaigns — notably in media planning and in content creation.

Among those lessons, we identified a segment of the population that is a priority for Vilebrequin: families with children. That customer profile has a higher LTV than single people or couples without children. There is first an effect on average basket, which is relatively large because a purchase is made for three or four people, or more depending on the number of children. But there is also an effect of recurrence, because children grow and need new swimwear more often, so a satisfied customer comes back to buy again more often.

That solid base of lessons, fed by the data, let us build a media plan fitted exactly to Vilebrequin’s needs, with a method we developed at bright: the Cube Marketing. The method rests on sorting marketing campaigns into three categories: Always On campaigns, which divide into recognition campaigns and performance campaigns; activation campaigns; and educational campaigns. The Cube method allows those campaigns to be followed properly, bringing the detailed media plan together with the list of announcements, the performance data and the breakdown of spend.

The strategic axes

In Vilebrequin’s case, the Always On campaigns are the performance and recognition campaigns that run all year with a clear, recurring message about the product collection, so as to build consideration with the consumer and generate purchases. The recognition campaigns build and feed Vilebrequin’s brand image with quality visuals and messaging, notably on banners across the various display networks, while the performance campaigns capitalise on that recognition at the moment the customer is ready to buy, notably on the search network.

Activation campaigns are those that reinforce the commercial push, with specific offers planned for maximum impact on purchases. Among the 2023 activations we had a summer collection planned for the strong swimwear season, and a children’s collection planned to match what the family audience expects.

A 360 media plan, and a financial plan

Those campaigns are spread across a media plan detailing the announcements through the year, by media lever and by strategic axis. Each type of campaign has a specific KPI that serves as its objective. So we have campaigns with recognition objectives, such as reach and delivery to as many people as possible, and performance objectives at different stages of the funnel, such as adding to basket or the final purchase. That cross-channel view lets the campaigns be planned around seasonality, prioritising the warm periods when consumers tend to buy swimwear — periods that differ notably between the northern and southern hemispheres.

The Cube method includes a detailed financial plan with the various costs: media, production and fees. Following the spend regularly makes it easier to reallocate budget after comparing what was planned against what was spent. We therefore put a system in place that lets us be as responsive as possible, and catch every opportunity as it comes.

Data tracking and following the results

Following the spend regularly always comes with following the results in detail, against the campaigns’ objectives. For Vilebrequin, bright’s Data Tracking team built a full setup for tracking the various KPIs across every channel, the dashboards and GA4. Data Tracking matters not only for following ROI and profit, but also for feeding the algorithms the most relevant data, and for building the audiences we want to target with our campaigns. Among the site’s visitors, we identified the segment of most interest to Vilebrequin — users with children — on the basis of the types of products viewed, added to basket and ordered on the site.

The example of families with children shows the bright method as a whole: a lesson from data science, put to work in media planning through the Cube Marketing method, in building the audiences to target, and in building the ads themselves. We will illustrate that last part with a concrete example, where we used an advanced method for building display banners: Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO).

To get the most out of this format, a few success factors have to be respected:

• Varied creative elements, of good quality: to feed the algorithms as well as possible and get the most performance, you need a certain number of different elements, so that several versions of the ad can be tested
• Relevant, well-configured audiences: DCO is particularly effective for targeting remarketing audiences. While keeping a simple campaign structure targeting broad audiences through a few dynamic creatives, it reaches each user with a version of the ad personalised to their profile, their customer life cycle and their purchasing behaviour.
• Relevant objectives and signals: for DCO to optimise and learn properly, you need data tracking that works for the platform in question, and a configuration that matches the objectives you want to optimise the campaign on. In choosing that objective, you always have to find the balance: an event of quality that happens often enough to feed the algorithm a sufficient flow of data.

The example below shows those success factors implemented in a Vilebrequin campaign on Google’s DSP, DV360. You can see several versions of visuals and copy, developed with bright’s creative advice, fitted to each of the audiences targeted — single people and parents, for instance. We put a dataLayer on the site so that each audience segment to be retargeted could be configured.

Impact

Fruitful work with bright.

Vilebrequin entrusted the management of its online presence to bright in April 2022. First the Search campaigns, then gradually new channels such as programmatic, DOOH and today TikTok. So that the campaigns’ results could be followed closely and optimised for profit, further projects were implemented with bright, notably in data tracking and data science.

Drawing on advanced experience in running international e-commerce campaigns, bright has considerably strengthened Vilebrequin’s online presence over the last two years, and today brings its expertise to every decision concerning the brand’s development across five continents. That expertise always comes with particular attention to the data and to the return on spend, and it is in that spirit that bright’s data team is currently working on implementing MMM (Marketing Mix Model) for Vilebrequin.

Everything done over the year contributed to very positive results in 2023 (+41.37% in e-commerce profit, +14.03% in ROAS on the levers bright manages). The volume, the return and the profit of the digital campaigns all rose against 2022. What is more, the share of revenue the digital campaigns contribute is rising too.

You can see clearly how the various projects — Data Science, Data Tracking, media planning by the Cube Marketing method — each contributed to improving the performance digital campaigns through the year. What 2023 taught us gives a solid base for improving further, and going further still, in 2024.

An MMM analysis is planned in particular, to give us an indication of the ideal split of budget across the various media levers. So we keep improving the campaigns at every level, so as to widen the brand’s recognition and get the client the most profit.