Jockey is a globally responsible designer and marketer of men’s and women’s apparel known for its hands-on customer service and 145 year history of producing high quality innovative products. In addition to selling through department stores and large volume retailers, Jockey has a large direct to consumer business through Jockey-operated retail stores, jockey.com and catalogs.
Although the brand has enormous market presence, the Jockey organization is actually quite smaller than its competitors. Jockey achieves this outsized market presence in part by having its marketing team stay hyper-focused on efficiency and testing to make sure everything they do delivers the best possible bang for their buck. As a result, when the Jockey team started seeing a dropoff in efficiency around digital advertising, they immediately jumped in to correct the situation.
Specifically, in the beginning of 2020, the team started to see a decline in digital advertising revenue despite an increase in traffic from that channel and, therefore, an increase in costs to drive that traffic. However, with more consumers spending more time online, Jockey recognized that putting more money toward the problem with traditional targeting methods would only result in increased costs with less returns. In response, they searched for a solution that could help improve performance and increase the efficiency of their advertising spend.
Improving digital advertising performance
For inspiration on how to improve digital advertising performance, Jockey’s digital team looked in-house to their very own email team. “Our email team had a lot of success getting more targeted with Bluecore, so we started to ask how we could expand that approach when marketing to consumers beyond the email channel. Our goal was to stop going after a huge swath of people and instead get more specific in the terms we bid on and the customers we retarget to allocate spending to our best customers and those who are most likely to buy,” explains Mark Mraz, Senior Director, Marketplace, SEM & Finance at Jockey.
This goal led Jockey to Bluecore and Criteo. Bluecore Advertise™ allows Jockey to use their first-party shopper data on major digital ad channels to predict what their shoppers want to see next and reach each individual with 1:1 recommendations. This is a leap forward from the standard targeting they were employing, where shoppers were getting irrelevant ads or ads for products they already purchased.
From there, Bluecore’s native integration with Criteo allowed the team to seamlessly extend their targeting capabilities for key customers to display advertising, similar to how they can target in other paid media channels like Google and Facebook.
While this partnership looked promising on paper, Jockey opted to prove its value first by leading a proof of concept. According to Mraz, they went in with a very specific goal of improving sales by 15% from the previous year while remaining the same or more efficient with spend, and they surpassed this goal almost immediately. Since then, the Bluecore Advertise™ and Criteo partnership has helped Jockey continue to enhance their digital advertising.
Boosting return on ad spend (ROAS) for efficient marketing spend
Getting more specific in the audiences they target with Bluecore Advertise™ enabled Jockey to improve ROAS on campaigns executed through Criteo. For instance, once they identify a group of customers with a high predicted lifetime value who are also likely to buy in the next 14 days, the Jockey team can allocate more of their spend toward this group of customers, which improves the efficiency of their marketing efforts by ensuring they don’t put dollars toward shoppers who won’t convert. It also creates a more timely and seamless product discovery experience for their customers by reaching them with the products they’re most likely to buy in a moment of need.
And while the highly targeted Bluecore audiences have consistently performed best, Mraz says that they’ve also seen increases in performance from less targeted, lower funnel campaigns. He notes that every audience Jockey targets gets measured on sales growth and ROAS, and those numbers have improved tremendously since his team started working with Bluecore and Criteo.
Overall, partnering with Bluecore Advertise™ and Criteo helped Jockey move performance in the right direction, including a 37% year-over-year increase in ROAS, a 109% increase in ROAS within the first two months working with Bluecore Advertise™ and Criteo, and a 30% year-over-year increase in program revenue.
About the partnerships, Mraz says, “Working with Bluecore and Criteo has improved pretty much every aspect of our advertising campaigns. I was surprised how quickly our performance turned around once we started working with them. We started seeing improvements in a matter of weeks, not the months I had expected.”
Learn more about how Jockey used Bluecore’s predictive models to build high converting audiences and about their test-and-learn strategy.
