L'Oréal Benelux's sponsored products operations represented roughly 60% of a rapidly expanding retail media budget, making it both a major media priority and central to the broader e-commerce strategy. However, the existing strategy had two major blind spots:
- Incrementality Black Box: Without incrementality metrics like iROAS, we couldn't separate truly incremental ad sales from baseline performance.
- Top-Down Budget Allocation: Budget decisions were made top-down, driven by CPC and volume requirements rather than category-level growth potential, limiting the existing strategy's ability to capture share in high-opportunity segments or respond dynamically to competitive shifts.
I led the development and implementation of Sponsored Products Strategy 4.0, a complete rebuild of L'Oréal's retail media approach built to drive incremental growth through evidence-based allocation and real-time optimisation.
By using newly available tools and platform capabilities that had not previously been integrated into a cohesive framework, the strategy centred on three integrated pillars:
- Bottom-Up Budget Allocation: Used Nielsen market share and share of search data to identify categories with the highest untapped growth potential, shifting investment toward strategic priorities rather than operational convenience.
- Real-Time Share of Voice Alignment: Used Pacvue to monitor campaign-level share of voice in real time, matching spend to market share targets using evidence-based marketing science demonstrating strong SOV-to-MS correlation.
- Tiered Product Activation Framework: Segmented Hero products by search ranking performance, activating high-ranking SKUs and low-ranking SKUs on different pages with different CPC strategies to maximise efficiency and visibility across the funnel.
The updated strategy received cross-functional buy-in by converting platform complexity into business-oriented outcomes, creating stakeholder confidence in the significant investment through rigorous, evidence-based architecture. It also produced measurably higher incremental sales while creating a scalable blueprint for future retail media investments on the digital shelf, keeping L'Oréal ahead of platform evolution and competitive dynamics in one of its fastest-growing digital channels.