Case Study: Nordstrom

Innervate helps Nordstrom Scale and Modernize its
Ad Creative Strategy

A CHANGE NEEDED DURING AN
IMPORTANT TIME OF YEAR

In retail, it’s well known the holidays are an essential time of the year, especially during a sales event. For Nordstrom, their annual holiday sale was right around the corner and they wanted to modernize their approach to managing and executing marketing creative to more effectively promote this important event.

Because Nordstrom sells numerous brands that encompass a diverse set of audience segments, the ability to target is essential. The ability to scale would also enable them to do more creative testing while building durable and actionable learnings.

To scale, the team needed to update their creative production processes. Like many advertisers, their typical creative process involved manually building creative, and then uploading it to a DSP or sending it to publishers. The creative process did not take advantage of the latest innovations in creative automation, such as artificial intelligence and leveraging a dynamic creative engine

Nordstrom needed a solution that could provide:

• Ad tracking and trafficking efficiency
• Detailed and actionable reporting
• Achievement of performance goals

After an informed vetting process, Innervate was evaluated on its ability to deliver on these goals

THE MODERN CREATIVE SOLUTION

Nordstrom leveraged key value components of the Innervate offering:

OPENING UP THE BLACK BOX

Nordstrom utilized Innervate's unique data visualization features to view all creative iterations, performance metrics, experiments and flights in one place. This was needed to efficiently and effectively orchestrate multiple versions across their audiences, support the evolution of their DMP strategy beyond black box targeting solutions, and align media

REORGANIZING TO GET ON THE PATH TO SCALABILITY

Nordstrom utilized the learning built natively into the platform, enabling an intuitive understanding of how creative is performing with a defined audience. Using this feature helped unlock scalability for Nordstrom to make better connections with the target audience.

JUMPSTARTING RESULTS IN RECORD TIME

Innervate helped Nordstrom go live quickly with minimal disruption, working with Nordstrom to integrate with existing technologies.

CAMPAIGN RESULTS

STREAMLINED ONBOARDING TO BEAT THE TIME-CRUNCH

Nordstrom was running on Innervate in 14 days. Nordstrom’s culture enabled them to move quickly, marshal resources, and ensure internal alignment. NextREV was also key in ensuring that everything went smoothly and that any minor issues were immediately managed.

Innervate connected with the processes that Nordstrom already had in place, allowing for rapid onboarding. This allowed them to be on the same page cross-functionally to effectively drive success via Innervate.

REDUCED FRICTION WITH A FLEXIBLE AND MALLEABLE PLATFORM

Innervate's open and modern architecture allowed for connections to existing technology within Nordstrom’s existing marketing and creative stacks. “We asked RevJet [Innervate] to be flexible and work with a lot of other tools to be able to fit into our ad tech ecosystem, and we’ve not run into a situation yet where RevJet [Innervate] is unable to do that,” said Michelle Alfano, senior marketing manager, Nordstrom. She continued, “RevJet's [Innervate] ability to integrate with other platforms that we work with is a differentiator in this space."

INCREASED EFFICIENCIES TO FOCUS ON WHAT REALLY MATTERS

For Nordstrom, consolidating tags within Innervate's Optimization Groups, and iterating without sending out new tags, creates efficiency with both their media team and their ad ops team because the trafficking requirements significantly decreased. The Nordstrom team also found the way in which Innervate organizes trafficking helpful, reducing their worrying about quality assurance.

DETAILED AND ACTIONABLE REPORTING SURFACED NEW MARKETING INSIGHTS

The insights gained from Innervate were new for Nordstrom, and it was simple to share the impact across the company. “The first thing that jumped off the screen was the way in which Innervate natively built learning into the platform,” Alfano said. “RevJet [Innervate] enables a very intuitive way to understand how creative is performing within a defined audience.” For a similar reason, detailed reporting was an important benefit of Innervate as well. This was also a net new ability for Nordstrom that allowed to them to definitively know what worked and what didn’t. Innervate provided durable, repeatable learnings that Nordstrom was able to apply to various creative processes.

UNLOCKED THE VALUE OF CREATIVE AND MORE

Three distinct and essential performance goals were achieved:

• Nordstrom is now able to personalize creative at scale within each customer segment
• Nordstrom has moved to a “Test, Don’t Guess” philosophy, and away from opinion-driven decision making
• Nordstrom has unlocked the process of achieving creative performance within Innervate, which makes it repeatable and data-driven

SAMPLE CAMPAIGNS

TAKING THE STRESS OUT OF HOLIDAY ADVERTISING

Utilizing Innervate's scheduling functionality, Nordstrom developed a creative calendar where ad creative can automatically run and pause to reflect the seasonal campaign calendar. Many different Black Friday treatments competed in head-to-head competition from November 23 through November 26.

INNOVATING WITH RE-TARGETING CREATIVE LIKE NEVER BEFORE

By connecting Innervate to their product feed, the Nordstrom team experimented with different approaches to re-targeting: In this case, Nordstrom ran a head-to-head experiment with a single product “vertical scrolling” ad creative versus a multi-product carousel creative.

In less than one day, Nordstrom discovered the multi-product creative performed 71.5% better than the single product “vertical scrolling” ad creative. That equated to 71.5% more product added to consumers’ shopping bags just by experimenting on Innervate.