Retail media implementation: Operational excellence with impressive results.
CPM won GOLD at the FMBE awards in January in the ‘Operational Success of the Year’ category for their Asda Twilight Team activity. In response to growing demand and the recent boom in Retail Media, CPM delivered a large Specialist team in just 6 weeks to fulfil branded bay and full aisle activations in the Asda estate. The Twilight team continue to deliver on all activations, 52 weeks of the year in over 370 stores with impressive results!
Find out how we did it.
THE CHALLENGE:
Create a specialist team to respond to growing demand
ASDA’s Retail Media Network, LS Eleven Media Services, have a long-standing partnership with CPM on supplier funded static media implementation. The boom of Retail Media in recent years has meant that, as an agency, CPM have had to respond to growing demand in this space from suppliers and brands who are looking to convert shoppers and influence shopper behaviour in aisle.
Branded bays and Aisle Takeover activations are a key part of media implementation, and CPM were required to co-create a new team that operated “out of hours” that adhered to all Health & Safety guidelines and at the same time kept disruption to ASDA customers to a minimum. This team has been dubbed the ‘Twilight team’.
The brief was clear - deliver this in 376 stores every Wednesday night, 52 weeks of the year.
THE SOLUTION:
Best in class implementation on a bigger, broader scale
Whilst CPM consistently deliver best in class media implementation for LS Eleven,
this challenge was centred on installations on a much bigger, broader and ambitious scale, and during Twilight hours which triggered a different set of considerations for CPM.
Deliver an ambitious recruitment, training and onboarding programme.
We set out an ambitious recruitment, training and onboarding programme for 376 new CPM colleagues to join our ranks in 6 short weeks. We initiated the recruitment process with our internal department and had an ambitious target to have circa 60 new colleagues join us every week, subsequently onboarding them into the business and training in the run up to ‘Go Live’, introducing a buddy system with our Field Management team. For our Aisle Takeover work, we also needed to factor into the recruitment process the need for candidates for specialised skills in working with huge vinyl applications. We ensured that we had good national coverage so that any supplier bookings in any part of the UK could be catered for.
Implement specialist health and safety training
We re-wrote the rule book with Health and Safety training and proper use of equipment. This included thorough training material and online course content which awarded CPM and our colleagues with Health and Safety accreditation for working at height, with specialist equipment and managing customer flow whilst working. Our toolkit also needed to be fit for purpose, and we invested in this area.
Operational excellence and compliance
To ensure we launched right first time, we needed to evolve our processes, working closely with our partner agencies, to ensure that every section of the critical path was achievable, and contingencies were in place to minimise risk of failure.
Store relationships are critical to our success; we ensured that we provided each store with appropriate CPM colleague support and guidance to help us achieve our desired compliance results for suppliers.
Enable additional analysis and reporting
Finally, our MI capabilities had to be ready to manage the additional data, analysis and performance results from another operation. We utilised a variety of reporting suites such as Power BI, Azure and ensuring our in-house Compliance Portal for Suppliers was ready for the additional workstream.
THE RESULTS:
Perfectly executed in time with 95% compliance
From January 2024, we have achieved the following results:
Successfully recruited and onboarded all our CPM Colleagues in the desired timescales
- Executed on over 275 campaigns, across 376 stores
- This equates to over 70,000 branded bays for our suppliers and LS Eleven Media Services
- We have activated on 20 Aisle Takeover Campaigns, implementing in 105 different aisles in the Asda store estate
- Achieved a coverage level of 99.5% on 20,000 visits
- Achieved a media compliance / implementation rate of 95%
- Achieved a pick-error rate through our Logistics and Distribution Partner below 1%
These figures help promote supplier re-investment into the proposition and future proofing our client’s business.
Hear it from ASDA
“Why do I love working with CPM?”
“The beauty of the relationship with CPM feels like a true partnership and one of collaboration. A recent example of this would be; we identified an issue with our operations in our stores in retail in putting up some of their media which was a bit tricky. It required an extra level of execution - we then created a Twilight Team with CPM so we worked together to find a response that worked with both of our businesses. The results that we’ve seen from that have been phenomenal really, our compliance went from around 50-60% up to the high 90%s – year on year the results have been great!”
Sian Durham, Head of In-store Proposition and Operations , ASDA
If you're looking for in-store operational excellence, media implementation, merchandising and compliance delivered by great teams - talk to us. We'd love to help your brand excel.
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