MikMak Beauty Webinar: Strategies and Success Stories

00:00:00:03 - 00:00:24:03
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
Thank you everyone for joining our latest in our Industry Insights webinar series. Previous quarters, we've taken a deep dive into the alcohol and grocery industries. Today's session will be focused on the beauty industry. We have some great speakers lined up to share some of the insights and best practices with you. Aside from myself, who's been working here at MikMak and in writing roles for the past four and a half years, we'll have our Founder and CEO, Rachel Tipograph

00:00:24:04 - 00:00:44:12
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
Many of you will recognize her from previous webinars, speaking engagements. She was just moderating a panel down in New Orleans earlier this week, and also from her BRAVE COMMERCE Podcast, which I always recommend subscribing to. We'll have Colleen DeRosa, a Senior Customer Success Manager, working with some of MikMak's biggest clients, including a number within the beauty and personal care industry.

00:00:44:14 - 00:01:03:15
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
And we're very excited to be joined by Chanté Waters, who works in the Media Strategy, Partnerships and Measurement, at Unilever for their beauty and well-being brands. We have a great conversation coming up later between Colleen and Chanté, and let's take a look at what else we'll be covering today. It's not as many steps as my skincare routine, but our webinar is broken out into six sections.

00:01:03:15 - 00:01:23:16
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
We'll take a quick MikMak overview to refresh and remind everyone of who we are. We'll hear from Rachel on the current state of the beauty industry. We'll be joined by Chanté and Colleen to talk about how Unilever is leveraging MikMak in their marketing strategies, and we'll take a look at some beauty success stories and best practices. Think more how to use MikMak in your marketing for a beauty brand.

00:01:23:18 - 00:01:48:20
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
Unless, you know, always use sunscreen with SPF or how to enhance your water line to make your eyes pop. Finally, we'll highlight some of our recent roadmap releases, as well as offer a sneak peak to summer upcoming initiatives. So let's start with who we are. MikMak worked with over 1900 consumer brands to help them grow commerce first. We believe if brands put themselves in the driver's seat to connect directly with shoppers, you won't need consultants.

00:01:48:21 - 00:02:15:04
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
You won't need panel data companies because consumers are showing you how they want to shop for your brand and your competitors. And that's how we help the biggest brands in the world drive success. We drive that success through the MikMak platform. The MikMak platform is two components: Commerce and Insights. Commerce enables conversion. Every touchpoint digital and social, paid media, organic content, retail media, networks, paid search, your brand website and more.

00:02:15:06 - 00:02:34:24
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
I always say if it can be a link, it could be a MikMak link. But more importantly, MikMak unlocks powerful and granular insights from the impression all the way down to basket level sales data. To answer your biggest business questions and drive your biggest business decisions. And we couldn't drive those conversions or capture and share such valuable insights.

00:02:35:03 - 00:03:03:12
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
If we didn't have a retailer network featuring the locations your consumers want to shop at, both online and in-store, MikMak is a true global enterprise. Now, with global retail, our network of 8000 plus retailers including big box retailers, mom and pop shops, marketplaces, beauty focused retailers and last mile players at MikMak we know our solutions only increase in value if we are deeply connected to your partner ecosystem.

00:03:03:14 - 00:03:25:15
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
Through our strategic partnerships, you can incorporate many of our key tech stack partners into MikMak, like NielsenIQ for brick and mortar store inventory data, your PIM and eCom providers. And of course, all the media platforms you invest in to drive demand. We will continue to innovate and build partnerships with top companies to help our brand partners evolve with the speed of their shoppers.

00:03:25:17 - 00:03:32:03
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
Now, to share her insights on the beauty industry and trends we're seeing in 2025. I'm happy to welcome Rachel to progress.

00:03:32:05 - 00:03:54:01
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
Hello. Thanks for joining us. Well, I got to tell you one thing. What we got right at the end of 2024 is that 2025 was going to be nuts. And I think we are all living through this in real time. When we were we were around the US presidential elections in 2024. I spent a lot of time connecting with our customers.

00:03:54:07 - 00:04:14:08
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
And as Michael shared, we work with over 2300 of the biggest brands in the world. And through all of my conversations trying to figure out what are going to be the key themes of 2025. Three things stood out. One, every brand manufacturer is trying to figure out how to generate profit against the backdrop of such a volatile market.

00:04:14:10 - 00:04:44:11
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
The second is in 2024, what was pretty consistent across everyone's earnings. Volume sales were down. And then finally the cost per customer to acquire a customer is higher than ever before. How do you ensure that this is a customer that stays with you? Cross shops. The portfolio, and you ultimately increase that lifetime value within those three buckets? When we really doubled clicked on what we're going to be, the headwinds and tailwinds to make these things come to life.

00:04:44:13 - 00:05:15:08
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
What I heard from all of you is that you were worried about price sensitivity, that you were worried about pending tariffs, and you were hopeful about the potential of AI to essentially increase automation within your organization, to ultimately either reduce headcount costs or be able to reallocate those costs elsewhere. Two of the three have already played out in real time, and I'm about to show you how in MikMak data that's actually playing out in the macro consumer economy.

00:05:15:10 - 00:05:36:03
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
But it's creating a lot of challenges already. There's a lot of question marks. And how are you going to increase demand when your margins might get potentially slammed by tariffs? Now there was a moment of hope, a moment of reprieve yesterday when Trump obviously said there's going to be a 90 day pause. And we saw the markets respond favorably.

00:05:36:05 - 00:06:01:08
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
But in my conversations with all of you, you're actively thinking about how are you going to navigate this year? And the three levers that I consistently heard is around pricing is around supply chain and around working media dollars. And what I'm hoping to show you right now with MikMak, real time data is to give you insight into how everyone is navigating this so you can make real time business decisions with this data.

00:06:01:10 - 00:06:32:02
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
So let's start with media. Well, 2025 started with a bang because obviously we live through the moment of January 19th to bring you back to January 19th. That's when TikTok went dark. And if you've been following MikMak, you know, on that day we watch TikTok traffic go to zero. The reality is, in calendar year 2024, on any given day, TikTok is our second most trafficked channel, with meta being number one.

00:06:32:04 - 00:07:11:19
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
So TikTok going to 0% on January 19th was a really big deal. But when we look at Q1 advertising data, so essentially we have 2300 of the biggest brands in the world trafficking MikMak against $2.5 billion of global ad spend. So this data that I'm taking you through is very significant. What we ultimately ended up seeing in Q1 is that TikTok came back, and by the second week of March, we started to see TikTok traffic reach Q4 levels.

00:07:11:21 - 00:07:39:17
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
And by April 1st, we actually saw TikTok traffic surpassed Q4 by around 20%. But who gained when TikTok went dark? The two platforms that we saw gain were Alphabet and Pinterest. Why? Because both of those platforms can drive conversion, and both of those platforms have been able to build your trust as an advertiser, as a place that is brand safe on the internet.

00:07:39:19 - 00:08:08:11
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
Meta. If you look closely here, when we look at Q1 data, we actually saw that decline by 3%. Now Meta is still the gorilla on any given day. Meta still represents 50% of our traffic, but that 3% decline is showing that you're willing to reallocate your spend elsewhere. And when we double click into Meta data, what we actually noticed is that decline started when Zuckerberg in January made an announcement about removing fact checking from the platform.

00:08:08:13 - 00:08:33:04
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
So that was a loud signal to us that what you are also examining is, is this a safe place for me to invest my brand equity dollars? So the big headline that I want you to know is that TikTok is back. And obviously, April 5th was supposed to be this other date where either TikTok was going to be owned by a new US parent owner or it was going to go away.

00:08:33:06 - 00:09:08:15
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
And once again, Trump extended the deadline 75 days. So June will be that next moment where we'll see what happens with TikTok. But if we're looking at recent history, I got to tell you that TikTok is here to stay. The second thing that I want to double click on is retailers. So another moment that happened in Q1 was the February 28th consumer boycott, where what news headlines were telling us is that consumers were going to boycott retail retailers because of how they were reacting to de.

00:09:08:17 - 00:09:33:03
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
Now, I'm just going to tell you my Rachel Tipograph point of view as a female gay founder. Obviously, DTI matters a whole lot to me, but what I'm just about to talk to you is just objective map data. This has nothing to do with my personal views. What MikMak data shows is that around the February 28th consumer boycott, consumers were more than happy to shop.

00:09:33:05 - 00:09:58:24
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
They just preferred to shop online. And the big winner of February 28th was Amazon. You can see here that we saw Amazon traffic surge around the February 28th consumer boycott. So if we get into the psyches of consumers, there might have been shame for them to walk into a physical target store. But they had no problem buying products on Amazon.

00:09:59:01 - 00:10:22:06
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
And you can see eMarketer was leveraging our data to understand this. And then finally, this is the big breaking news that I want to share with you today. So we're all very concerned about tariffs. And obviously it's a moving target. And yesterday gave us some hope. But what we have done is we have analyzed MikMak data over the last three weeks.

00:10:22:07 - 00:10:54:21
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
So this is data all the way through yesterday night. And what I can tell you is that over the last three weeks, MikMak conversion rates have essentially hovered at 9%. No matter what Trump was doing, no matter how any other country was reacting, and no matter how Wall Street was reacting or what news headlines were saying. And I bring this into the conversation, because what we all need to trust right now is real time consumer data.

00:10:54:23 - 00:11:19:15
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
Everything else is emotional. And so one thing that I want to point out here is that you might see this dip, which was last week on Tuesday, which technically was April 1st. Trump made his announcements on April 2nd. What I want you to know is that this dip has nothing to do with tariffs. On the first of every month, we consistently see this in MikMak data.

00:11:19:17 - 00:11:45:19
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
A lot of our customers media plans essentially reset. And so their lowest traffic day is the first of every month. So really if you take that out and you completely normalize this data, it's 9% conversion rates across the board. So the yellow line represents this week. So this is data all the way through yesterday. I'm going to go back on LinkedIn I posted on LinkedIn this morning sharing this data.

00:11:45:21 - 00:12:04:13
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
And I'll share what we ended up seeing throughout the course of the week. But right now it's business as usual at MikMak, based on the real time consumer data that we're seeing. I'll be very curious to hear if you're seeing similar things from other data providers. So hit me up my email. You know, it's rachel@mikmak.com or on LinkedIn.

00:12:04:13 - 00:12:33:01
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
I want to hear from you. And then finally, now to double click into beauty. So beauty and personal care represents around 25% of MikMak customers. And so last year we saw 1.5 billion shoppers go through MikMak, and 25% of that reacted with beauty and personal care. So it's a very, very large consumer set that we're about to talk about.

00:12:33:03 - 00:12:59:22
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
So the first thing is, beauty, in many ways was obviously hit hard last year. A lot of that had to do because of the Chinese consumer. Right? A large portion of your global revenue probably comes from China. And we know that the Chinese consumer, post pandemic did not return the same way that it was pre-pandemic. And so across the board, beauty earnings were hit pretty hard.

00:12:59:22 - 00:13:36:05
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
Of course, there were a few outliers. And some of those outliers are our customers. And I can tell you the difference between those who were hit really hard and those who are the outliers, those who are the outliers. Recognize that you absolutely have to do full funnel marketing. And while retailers might be walking into your offices and demanding 20% year over year increase in spend through their retail media networks, what we're consistently seeing and hearing from you is that that ain't driving incrementality.

00:13:36:07 - 00:14:00:14
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
That's not bringing new consumers into the funnel. The outliers recognize that, yeah, they might got to pay to play with retailers. But the reality is that's the cost to serve the customer. If you want to drive growth, you got to invest in upper funnel media and these brands. A lot of the beauty brands that we're I'm talking about, they showed up at the Super Bowl.

00:14:00:16 - 00:14:25:15
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
They invested in CTV. They went heavy with TikTok. They went heavy with influencers. They didn't just go all in investing in retail media and the promise of the. But in upper funnel media, they're doing full funnel to drive volume growth. So when we look at MikMak data and we go into the beauty category, we want to highlight a few things.

00:14:25:17 - 00:14:50:18
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
One is to substantiate what I was just saying. So we have a front row seat. We get to see how everyone is investing their media dollars. And again within the category, what you can see here is that 84% of the investment went to social follow by video. Video is streaming video CTV followed by search. And then essentially everything else.

00:14:50:20 - 00:15:19:18
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
So beauty is clearly going heavy. Heavy in social. But there's another way to look at this. Now you have to play there because obviously all your competitors are playing there. But what you also can see here is beauty is being completely underserved right now on display. And I share this because you're looking for growth. And I'm a very big believer that you gotta would identify those white spaces where your competition is in play.

00:15:19:20 - 00:15:49:01
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
So food for thought for you in 2025. The second thing is let's get a little bit more granular here. While the majority of traffic is happening in social, it actually isn't the highest converting channel. The highest converting channel is when you get someone to come to your website. So you know, MikMak, now 90% of our customers are using us in media and also in their owned and operated channels, which is brand websites and mobile apps.

00:15:49:03 - 00:16:13:00
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
If you get someone to your website, they're obviously very inclined to consider and shop your products. And you can see average conversion rates that we're seeing. There's 35%. Very similar to that is organic search. What's very interesting for search is for a long time search for MikMak was Google search. And Bing ChatGPT is now beginning to pop in our traffic.

00:16:13:02 - 00:16:47:17
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
So consumers are asking questions in an environment like ChatGPT like, hey, I have rosacea, what product should I look to? And we're starting to see our software appear there. But obviously that means your being surfaced in those search results. And so if there's anything that you need to think about in 2025, in a way that you haven't had to think about over the last decade, is you really have to think about your organic SEO, then paid search, then organic social, and then finally paid social.

00:16:47:19 - 00:17:12:18
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
So when you think about your investment strategy, we've gone so hard into paid social for all the reasons that we know. But if you are trying to drive short term sales, or you're trying to think about the change in the customer journey, I got to tell you, SEO really needs to be top of mind. How are you optimizing your organic content to show up in new formats like ChatGPT?

00:17:12:20 - 00:17:46:05
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
When it comes to conversion rates within paid social, which is where the lion's share of spend is happening. Meta is number one. YouTube is number two. Pinterest is number three. TikTok is number four. Then Snap and Reddit. So meta continues to be the gorilla. Meta for us is dual placement. Or actually I should say triple placement. And right now where you talk about Facebook, Instagram and reels, but don't sleep on an environment like YouTube, right?

00:17:46:06 - 00:18:15:23
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
It's the power of TV with the backbone of search, all within the alphabet environment. And then from a retailer standpoint, I mean of no surprise here. And I'm hearing it with all of our customers. The retailer environment, especially in the US, is starting to get in many ways smaller and smaller. It's all about Amazon and Walmart. Even in premium beauty, we're starting to see Walmart pop targets definitely struggling.

00:18:16:00 - 00:18:39:09
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
And specialty retail is struggling. And it's it's just become a war now between Amazon and Walmart. So I imagine a lot of what you're thinking about right now is how you're going to optimize your supply chain for Amazon and Walmart. And, you know, the one place where Walmart kicks Amazon's ass is in grocery. But one place where Amazon kicks Walmart's ass is in marketplace.

00:18:39:11 - 00:18:59:16
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
And so you're going to start to hear from both of those parties because they're just going after each other for market share. And so if you're in the driver's seat to help them either win in grocery or win in marketplace, you're going to become their best friends. And that's how you're going to unlock opportunity in your GP agreements and then taking more of an international lens.

00:18:59:16 - 00:19:28:09
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
It's a different story. You don't see names like, Amazon or Walmart being the first or second place here. So in the UK it's Boots, in France it's Nocibe. Apologies. My pronunciation there. Spain, it's Douglas in Germany it's Druni. It's also Douglas in an environment like Italy. And so you can start to see retailer preference really changes based on where the consumer is in the world.

00:19:28:11 - 00:19:36:09
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
And now I'm going to turn it over to Colleen to talk with our amazing partner at Unilever, who are constantly grateful for their partnership.

00:19:36:11 - 00:19:39:07
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
Awesome. Thanks, Rachel. Hey, Chanté.

00:19:39:09 - 00:19:41:04
Chanté Waters, Unilever
Hi. How are you doing?

00:19:41:06 - 00:19:43:00
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
Good, good. How are you doing?

00:19:43:01 - 00:19:43:24
Chanté Waters, Unilever
Pretty good.

00:19:44:01 - 00:20:04:10
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
Good. Thank you for joining us. I know as the person who's responsible for media strategy, partnerships and management. You are probably a busy bee, so thank you for taking the time out of your day. Of course. Awesome. Well, can you tell us a little bit more about your role at Unilever? I won't make you tell a fun fact unless you really want to.

00:20:04:12 - 00:20:26:04
Chanté Waters, Unilever
Sure. So my name is Chanté Waters. I've been at Unilever for a little over five years. And in my current role, I lead our full funnel media and retail marketing functions for our beauty business. I think what's exciting about the role is that it's really the central source of accountability for the next best dollar invested. Full stop.

00:20:26:06 - 00:21:02:03
Chanté Waters, Unilever
And the reason why it's also unique is because it really bridges five different areas of, of marketing. And I'm sure we'll talk about it, over the next few minutes. But national media. So like you mentioned, our hard working brand media, those beauty partnerships that we want to make sure that, we land so that there's, a deeper desire for our brands, shopper marketing, how we show up in our customers aisles virtually and in store, our retail media, how do we partner with the retail media networks to ensure that our brands are at the top of the virtual aisle are consumer promotions and couponing.

00:21:02:03 - 00:21:20:24
Chanté Waters, Unilever
Right. So one of the most important levers that we have in order to impact in the short term, and then all of that is really underpinned by performance measurement. So those five functions, are within my remit. It gives my team really a beautiful canvas to ensure that we're building a full end to end model for advertising.

00:21:21:01 - 00:21:45:19
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
Excellent. Great. A beautiful canvas indeed. And you kind of talk about that next best dollar. And you're talking about sort of balancing that national and shopper media. I'm curious in the current ecosystem, sort of how you view some of that without giving away too many Unilever trade secrets. And how MikMak sort of fits into that for you when we're thinking about national Shopper and the ways that they are enmeshed as well.

00:21:45:21 - 00:22:11:06
Chanté Waters, Unilever
Of course. So I would say our investment split across national and retailer historically was really driven by operational needs. If I'm being honest, rather than our brand objectives and priorities that we knew really helped demand creation. So with our new restructure and, culmination of all of those elements into one team, what we're doing is we're looking at what are the sales opportunities by customer.

00:22:11:08 - 00:22:32:22
Chanté Waters, Unilever
And we've restructured our team in a way that we've had really the concept of retailer marketing. So we're not looking at retail media, how we're partnering with retail networks in absolute, from what we're doing from consumer promotions or shopper marketing. It's really been a game changer to just look at that holistically, so that we're very clear on how we're driving folks business.

00:22:32:24 - 00:22:55:06
Chanté Waters, Unilever
But then within the total ecosystem, once we kind of attach that retail or marketing element to our broader media and, consumer promotions, one of the ways that we've really evolved is changing. And looking at performance at the start. So I'm a media strategist, at heart. And really, what I know is the birthplace of any strategy is your performance and your results.

00:22:55:08 - 00:23:13:22
Chanté Waters, Unilever
You can have a flashy vision of what the future is, but if you're not grounded in the reality and what's delivered in the past, you're going to kind of be spinning your wheels for a little bit. So we looked at how channels are interacting with each other. What's most impactful in terms of the number of different dimensions that we can look at within those channels?

00:23:13:24 - 00:23:43:00
Chanté Waters, Unilever
And really started to build out different models that helped get really shape our campaign architecture based off of size of business objective, etc.. But I will say it was an internal process that really changed how we adapt our measurement. That ultimately led to really strong insights of how we balance across those different channels. And I would say it some truths that, like media experts know every single day and have to defend.

00:23:43:02 - 00:24:02:22
Chanté Waters, Unilever
But it also helped reframe and showcase some of the strength, even in like, retail elements and driving awareness. Right. Like, I think sometimes we get super comfortable in placing one channel in one area and not understanding that every touchpoint is an opportunity for you to impact customer perception.

00:24:02:24 - 00:24:21:15
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
Yeah, absolutely. We talk all the time at Micmac about how many touchpoints, occur before somebody even makes a purchase, right? So yeah, thank you for sharing that. Very insightful. And actually a good segue into a couple interesting things that Unilever has done lately that we, that we want to talk through as well. So, Michael, if you want to hit the next slide.

00:24:21:17 - 00:24:41:08
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
Okay, cool. So this is just a quick article about how recently you guys use Nvidia's Omniverse platform to create copies of products that you could use across channels. So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about this, and if there's other emerging marketing trends, specifically in the beauty industry, that are kind of exciting you right now.

00:24:41:10 - 00:25:04:03
Chanté Waters, Unilever
Yeah. So I would say a lot of the partnership and conversation that we've had around creative and creative diversification and accelerated. It's been focused on how do we make content better, faster and more impactful at scale. This is exactly kind of taking all three of those marks. We know that this technology is going to be really, really pivotal.

00:25:04:03 - 00:25:34:06
Chanté Waters, Unilever
Pivot pivotal. Sorry in our transformation. And it frees up time for our talent to really focus on creativity and pushing boundaries. Right. We're not tinkering with, making sure that we have our bottles. Correct. It's those digital twins can be deployed accurately, consistently, and it really gives space for us to focus on, like the true creative nature of the work that we do, which is pretty unique to the second point of your question of things that excite me currently.

00:25:34:07 - 00:26:08:02
Chanté Waters, Unilever
It's a really good question. As a media expert, I am really excited to see how creative diversification continues to accelerate, how, the deployment of creative almost grows by an order of magnitude in order to serve what we're trying to, achieve in terms of our business priorities. But really, what's most exciting is we're able to tap into consumer motivations and cohorts and, like, build relevancy in a way that, frankly, would take massive, massive resources in order for us to unlock.

00:26:08:02 - 00:26:34:19
Chanté Waters, Unilever
So that's really exciting. Because we're going to get to more impactful work there. Secondly, and probably be remiss, to not mention this and, connect with MikMak, but social commerce is something that I also find quite exciting. It's taking a little bit of a dimension, in a different way in the US versus some of our other markets, but I really think it's going to reshape shopping behavior.

00:26:34:21 - 00:27:01:12
Chanté Waters, Unilever
The perception of our brands, and I think it gives marketers a chance to really, really be focused on, how do we build our brand consistently? So those impulsive moments of purchase, which, by the way, we're always there, just in a different form, are impacted by what we can control as marketers, knowing that now we have to, understand that some of that perception is also shaped by consumers themselves.

00:27:01:14 - 00:27:28:00
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
Yeah, absolutely. No, that totally makes sense. And that's really exciting to hear your point of view on it. And when we're talking about kind of like understanding that shopper a little bit more, kind of leads us to your next point of innovation. And you guys are working on. So we have another example, where we had a little bit of a partnership in this as well, where shoppers, took a personalized hair quiz that was led by an AI chat bot on your site.

00:27:28:02 - 00:27:44:17
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
And by the end of the quiz, they were met with their perfect product. This was specifically around Dove Hair Care and then via a MikMak link, they could check out at their favorite retailer. I took the quiz and it turns out that my hair needs more moisture than I originally thought, but that's like, you know, a whole other story.

00:27:44:19 - 00:27:45:18
Chanté Waters, Unilever
We have a mask for that.

00:27:45:18 - 00:27:47:19
Chanté Waters, Unilever
that I'll send you a link to.

00:27:47:21 - 00:28:10:07
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
Okay. Amazing. That was the one that I think that I ended up, getting led to. So I got I got to work on that. But I'm curious how all of this innovation and leveraging AI in this case, and even in the slide before, is helping you optimize your media campaigns and spend. I feel like you touched on a little bit, but there's anything else for this particular use case that you'd want to share.

00:28:10:09 - 00:28:17:08
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
So actually we're thinking about leveraging that first party data that you got to capture, through this, this project, if you will.

00:28:17:10 - 00:28:38:07
Chanté Waters, Unilever
Yeah. So first, I will say the utilitarian purpose of the, beauty tech tool that we deployed is super important. I think sometimes we get excited by something that feels super technologically advanced. It like, delivers on all of the things that pull it marketers heartstrings. But if you're not actually delivering what a consumer needs, it's not going to drive that purpose.

00:28:38:07 - 00:29:11:11
Chanté Waters, Unilever
Right. And that purchase, which is really, really important for us. So that was really at the heart of the, actual, quiz that we developed in terms of other AI that's being deployed. I think it's across a number of different spaces. And you've probably seen and heard a lot of what Unilever's, executing what I think is interesting, within my remit is that one we're looking at from a creative lens, creative diversification, knowing that our creative is going to get stronger, it's going to be faster.

00:29:11:11 - 00:29:30:08
Chanté Waters, Unilever
We're going to have to operationalize how we do that. But also we have the moment to take a step back, let our partners and their algorithms and the tools that they're producing as well, really lead us in a way that will probably move us along much faster than we did in the past, where we would kind of wait and, look at certain moments.

00:29:30:10 - 00:30:05:11
Chanté Waters, Unilever
The other piece, in terms of how we're looking at AI, within the media area, is really through our measurement, right? So we're leaning into it in a creative space. We're looking at how our partners are using and scaling their individual solutions. And then everything that we're doing in terms of measurement across a full ecosystem is all driven by, AI to make sure that we're looking at performance in the short term, in the long term, and then just having an active pulse of like, what creative is resonating most with, consumers.

00:30:05:13 - 00:30:21:00
Chanté Waters, Unilever
How are we doing in terms of driving traffic to some of our customers and how really our partnership ecosystem, is balanced and what kind of opportunities we have to infuse more investment to drive a higher return.

00:30:21:02 - 00:30:45:23
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
Absolutely. Yeah. It sounds like you're balancing new technology and fundamentals in a way that's, really taking off for the business. So. Excellent. Very cool. Great. Okay, so, this is just something that recently you worked on with our team in terms of, target coupon for the Dove Defy Body Serum. Basically, how this worked was that this, coupon call was appended to the MikMak experience.

00:30:46:00 - 00:31:10:24
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
And once that was activated, so not only, of course, a lift and shoppers clicking through to target, but an overall, increase in purchase intent rate as well. And specifically from TikTok campaigns. So just sort of an example of, you know, how we were working together to not only drive shoppers down the funnel, but also gather those key insights along the way.

00:31:11:01 - 00:31:22:23
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
And so when we spoke the other day, you were talking about how retailer coupons and performance measurement were really going hand-in-hand for you, and you were excited about that at Unilever. So I wonder if there's anything you want to share on that.

00:31:23:00 - 00:31:43:17
Chanté Waters, Unilever
Yeah. So I will say first, this was probably one of the fastest but also most impactful tasks that we've been recently able to execute. What's unique about it is, of course, we would want to know or let consumers know that there's an offer, right? If they're engaged, if we have the insights in the data from MikMak to know that they are a target shopper, right.

00:31:43:23 - 00:32:10:15
Chanté Waters, Unilever
It's only, an additional motivator to make sure that they actually convert the purchase. For us, I think that it really, helps us in terms of how do we react to marketplace changes or needs or our business needs very, very quickly. And that's what a lot of consumer promotions activity does. What we have the opportunity to do is to increase that dramatically with the support of media.

00:32:10:17 - 00:32:21:04
Chanté Waters, Unilever
So I think it's something that's really exciting that we tested, and we all felt very good that it would perform well. But seeing the metrics and the actual performance itself was absolutely wonderful.

00:32:21:06 - 00:32:39:07
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
Yeah, great. Yeah, definitely really excited about that. From a MikMak perspective and Unilever perspective. So awesome. Well, thank you so much. We're gonna kind of segue into the next part of the deck, but anything else that you that you want to share, in this moment, before we talk about some MikMak use cases.

00:32:39:09 - 00:32:42:08
Chanté Waters, Unilever
I think, I think that's it. Thank you so much.

00:32:42:10 - 00:32:47:16
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
Awesome. Thank you. We'll keep you around for the Q&A in case people have questions for you. Awesome.

00:32:47:16 - 00:32:48:21
Chanté Waters, Unilever
Sounds good.

00:32:48:23 - 00:33:08:13
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
All right. Thank you so much. Chanté and Colleen, like Colleen mentioned there at the end, there's a Q&A later. Pretty sure there's a Q&A button in the bottom of your screen when you're viewing this. You can submit your questions through there and we will, answer those at the end. But now we're going to dive in to some best practices and use cases.

00:33:08:15 - 00:33:36:01
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
You saw and heard Rachel talked about this earlier. You know, really today, the funnel, you know, it's not so much three separate unique pieces. It's becoming more and more clear, that when you're running effective marketing, these tactics are more connected, intertwined and conjoin than ever before. Brands that use MikMak throughout all these stages are in the best position to win over consumers and provide that frictionless, shortened path to purchase.

00:33:36:03 - 00:33:58:00
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
An example of that. You know, using our first party data through MikMak, you can capture and segment consumers by which media channels and platforms they prefer, what content they're responsive to, product interest and retail preferences. You can then use that data to kind of better drive omnichannel sales and funnel qualified shoppers into retail media networks to improve performance.

00:33:58:02 - 00:34:19:10
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
You already know where they spend their time, what content they interact with, what products they're interested in, and where they prefer to shop. Use those insights available to you through MikMak to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your media dollars. We're going to walk through some specific examples now and welcome Colleen back onto the call to talk about some additional MikMak use cases.

00:34:19:12 - 00:34:43:01
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
All right. Thanks, Michael. Yeah. So this is an exciting success story where we had a beauty brand who leveraged MikMak first party data and ultimately saw, notable CPC and efficiency improvements year over year. And then this was basically done by optimizing their media campaigns toward shoppers who we know clicked through to the MikMak experience or qualified shoppers.

00:34:43:03 - 00:35:10:12
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
And not only did those CPC efficiencies approve, improve 59%, but purchase intent rate was over three acts of other audiences that were, you know, sort of like from meta and from other places, that that were kind of maybe less qualified. And so, to put it simply, MikMak first party data ultimately comes at no extra cost in our contracts and is an excellent way for you to get the most out of your marketing dollars.

00:35:10:14 - 00:35:33:21
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
If it's something you're not leveraging right now, then talk to your Customer Success Manager about it. Okay. And then this one's really exciting too, because, you know, we've talked a lot about MikMak for media. And this here is more of an example of a brand that is using MikMak and not only for shoppable media campaigns, but also via a widget on the brand website as well.

00:35:33:23 - 00:36:11:19
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
So this is our partnership with Nioxin. And as we all know, we've probably felt firsthand that, like shoppers, we kind of distracted on our path to purchase. So even those high intent audiences who will come directly to brand websites looking for their six step skincare routine, kind of like Michael, and, you know, including MikMak where to buy widget on your DTC site is just another opportunity to kind of streamline that path to purchase and then make sure that shoppers who are coming to your site for that, you know, perfect shade of lipstick or hair color are able to more seamlessly checkout at the retailer of their choice.

00:36:11:19 - 00:36:33:17
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
So when we combine that brand, brand, website and that shoppable media tactic, we found that's the best way to kind of have your cake and eat it too. So you're really capturing that demand and then in real time, moving shoppers down the funnel all in one go. Okay. And then this last one here is about some of our, influencer capability.

00:36:33:17 - 00:36:58:05
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
So I'm sure that I'm not the only one on this webinar who's stayed up past their bedtime on TikTok looking for a skincare routine that's going to make me look like I'm 22 again. But with MikMak data, you can see in real time which influencers are getting shoppers from their nightly tick tock scroll to the retailer of their choosing and ultimately purchasing your products so we can make that mapping very clear for you with our data.

00:36:58:07 - 00:37:21:02
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
And so what's interesting here is that after CoverGirl made their influencer content shoppable, purchase intent, right, ended up soaring above the beauty industry benchmark. And also, we were able to learn along the way that Amazon and Walmart were the retailer's preferred read by these specific shoppers after being served this specific influencer ad. So a lot of layers here.

00:37:21:04 - 00:37:26:20
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
A lot of insight to uncover and, to better optimize your, your media and your partnerships.

00:37:26:22 - 00:37:53:05
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
Thank you. Colleen, I know we mentioned a lot of different features and solutions available to you through MikMak during this, whether it's audiences or other. We're gonna hit on some really quickly to specifically call them out. Just as some best practices available to you here is our direct add to cart feature. You're removing a step from that shopper journey by taking consumers straight from the MikMak experience to adding items in the cart at preferred Retailer.

00:37:53:07 - 00:38:12:22
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
Another one that is available to you that we've seen highlighted throughout this are what we call our retail media experiences. This, you know, direct shoppers immediately to a retailer kind of bypassing that traditional MikMak landing page and interstitial. We can set up the back end for custom retail allocations. So you have full control over what percent of traffic goes to which retailer.

00:38:13:02 - 00:38:36:02
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
So if you know, for instance, that your retailer preference share is usually, you know, 50% Amazon, 25% Walmart, 25% target, you can send 50% of your traffic directly to Amazon, 25 to a Walmart. Target. Used simple math there for me, but another great tool, that you can leverage in is retailer specific campaigns. Your brand may be running.

00:38:36:04 - 00:38:56:11
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
And pro tip, use this experience type tool to kind of provide incremental traffic and sales to key retail partners in exchange for in-store positioning and end cap displays. Kind of use these in your joint business planning sessions and final kind of MikMak feature we're going to highlight today is just using MikMak with your influencer partners.

00:38:56:13 - 00:39:26:07
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
This provides benefits from both parts of the MikMak platform. You know, shoppers interacting with your influencers can find a seamless path to purchase, transforming your user generated content into sales opportunities. And MikMak also provides on the side that unbiased third party data on the performance of your influencers across different platforms, all in one place. And we can even go as granular as, you know, did influencer content that was link in bio perform better than Reels on Instagram, for instance?

00:39:26:09 - 00:39:41:05
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
So it's all available there. Check it out. We are going to move on to the next section really quick. As exciting as I get talking about everything MikMak can do for you today, I get even more excited talking about and learning about what we're going to be able to do for you in the future.

00:39:41:07 - 00:39:46:21
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
To talk about that, with us now is Rachel to walk through the MikMak roadmap.

00:39:46:23 - 00:40:12:16
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
Hello, 2025. We're still here, but at MikMak we are thinking about what does the world look like five years from now and how do we continue to place big bets to move the industry forward? MikMak actually turns 11 in September, which is crazy, which means when we started the company, we started during what I describe as the social media self-service commerce era.

00:40:12:18 - 00:40:30:04
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
So when every brand was coming to market on the backbone of Shopify and Facebook ads. But we all know that playbook stopped working and it stopped working in the year 2020. And it has nothing to do with the pandemic. It has everything to do with changes in data privacy, and that created the perfect storm for the rise of retail media.

00:40:30:06 - 00:40:50:02
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
Why? Because the retailers had first party data to monetize, and the billion dollar brands that were being built over the last four years were being built at mass retail. And so we described the last four years as the commerce, media, commerce data as a service era. But we know that the world is changing again, and we literally pegged it to this year.

00:40:50:04 - 00:41:09:24
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
And the reason why has nothing to do with Trump has nothing to do with tariffs, has everything to do with the fact that Gen Z turns 30 this year. What happens in your 30s? You become the next great buying power. You buy a house, you have a kid, you get married. And how Gen Z sees themselves is so drastically different than prior generations.

00:41:10:02 - 00:41:34:18
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
They're more racially diverse, the more sexually diverse. And I share all of this because if this is the next great consumer, tech needs to be as dynamic as this consumer, which is why MikMak believes from a technology standpoint, we are entering what we describe as a commerce, intelligence, composable commerce era. And the two things that are it's going to be predicated on is AI and APIs.

00:41:34:20 - 00:41:55:00
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
And we're going to tell you a little bit about what we're doing there. So in 2025, there's really three key areas where we're making significant investments. The first is time to value. Meaning we got to make sure that you can use the MikMak platform as fast as humanly possible. And there's a whole slew of work that's happening to make that happen.

00:41:55:02 - 00:42:28:09
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
The second is how a consumer interacts with MikMak So that's in the MikMak commerce side. And going back to what we know to be true for most brands in 2025, it's that you got to increase volume sales, and how are you going to increase volume sales by capturing conversion higher up in the funnel. And so a big part of what we're doing this year is bringing MikMak to add to cart technology to the media and pressure level, as opposed to the post click level, and also bringing AI to the forefront of what we do.

00:42:28:11 - 00:43:13:14
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
We know exactly how to sell mascara. We know how to exactly sell foundation, we know how to exactly sell moisturizer, and we should be auto optimizing those experiences based on MikMak data and MikMak insights side, which I personally believe that's where the tremendous value of MikMak exists for you. We are making significant investments on the AI side. Predictive analytics, automated insights, bringing in new types of reports like bringing market share data alongside all of your media conversion data, bringing in all the Out-Of-Stock data that we use in MikMak commerce to essentially surface the right retailers or product availability is now bringing into the reporting.

00:43:13:16 - 00:43:39:00
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
So picture a heat map of the world, all the places where you're creating demand and then layering that with out of stock data. So then you, the marketing team can tell your supply chain team, hey, we are driving demand. The product is the problem is that the new product is available right now. And then a major, major step change that we're going to be doing in the platform, which you need to sign up for our May 21st Q2 product announcement.

00:43:39:00 - 00:44:00:06
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
Because I can't give away too much detail here, but I promise you, it is the biggest change that we're about to make in the platform for years to come, which has everything to do with attribution, data and sales data at MikMak and leveraging AI. So please sign up to learn more. And then just on what we've released so far, we've made major investments in our APIs.

00:44:00:06 - 00:44:20:00
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
We're extremely bullish that the industry has matured. And what you want is you want to be able to own this MikMak data, meaning you want to be able to own that front end experience so your brand can truly be the differentiator. And you're not in a sea of sameness from self-serve templates. So that's our Headless Commerce API to MikMak insights, our API.

00:44:20:02 - 00:44:41:05
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
This data shouldn't be sitting in MikMak inside self-serve platform. It should be sitting in your corporate data, like alongside all the other metrics that you use to measure your business, like Nielsen IQ and Kantar and your supply chain data. So VR, API, all of that can be ingested into your corporate data lake continued investments into our retailer integrations.

00:44:41:05 - 00:45:14:00
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
So obviously last year we brought a first to market DoorDash integration. Now we're doing that with Instacart and Uber Eats. You're going to hear a lot more about that in our Q2 product release, and a ton more updates on the user experience side, I teased a little bit about Q2, but one thing that I want to bring up that I haven't mentioned, especially in the backdrop of you thinking about your margins, one of the things that we recognize that MikMak is that we sit on all this pricing data, meaning we literally know your price at every single retailer.

00:45:14:05 - 00:45:44:02
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
We know when it changes. We know what your competitors prices are. And the reality is, is we've not been leveraging that data. And what's so unique about MikMak is that we literally can tell you the exact price, the exact pack size that can convert in every single media channel. So think about revenue growth management brought to media. So literally being able to tell your boss, hey, this is the exact price and pack size that's going to convert in TikTok.

00:45:44:07 - 00:46:02:07
Rachel Tipograph, MikMak
That's going to invert and meta. That's going to convert in the Trade Desk. So our pricing intelligence is going to be a huge release in Q2. But sign up for the May 21st product event, because I've honestly haven't even told you about the best thing that's about to come. So on that note, I think we are going to do, some Q&A.

00:46:02:09 - 00:46:16:05
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
I see one, in the chat of how do we ensure we're sending customers to the right retailers when leveraging the direct to retailer experience type? I don't know if we have a volunteer for that on, if not, I think oh, Colleen coming off.

00:46:16:06 - 00:46:48:08
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
Yeah. Oh, I'm excited about this one. So sort of as you had mentioned before, Michael, when you were talking about those custom retailer allocations. So when you're using the direct to retailer experience and you can say X amount of the time, I want shopper to go to target, Amazon, Walmart. What's exciting there is that because we have two different, experience types, one where you can, tag the landing page and another one where you can send folks right to their retailer of choice.

00:46:48:10 - 00:47:13:18
Colleen DeRosa, MikMak
We're able to learn what shoppers want to shop where and provide you with a Walmart audience, a target audience, etc. in order to, to inform those, those decisions a little bit more so that we know we're sending target people to Target and Walmart people to Walmart. So that's an exciting sort of new, new feature for us or something that, you know, we've, we've been doing awesome.

00:47:13:20 - 00:47:32:23
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
Thank you. Colleen, just looking through it again. And reminder, if you have questions about your on here, feel free to submit them. I see one around recommendations for best practices for leveraging influencers, which I'm happy to talk about, have been talking a lot about influencers with my customers, through MikMak lately. But really that big part of it is the insights we get.

00:47:32:23 - 00:47:55:14
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
I feel like, you know, you're not relying on platform data of how it's performing. You're not relying on self-reporting from an influencer. You're going to see clicks generated to retailers from the influencer activity. You're going to see sales on the back end. And, from there, you know, like I mentioned earlier, even more granular, you know, does influencer stories or reels perform better than a link in bio sort of thing?

00:47:55:19 - 00:48:15:12
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
You can kind of mix and match your strategy to what's working best for your consumers. And I always say, a lot of my customers always hear me say it, but AB test it. I don't know if there's, you know, necessarily one is better than the other, but let's find out what platform is the best, which placement option is the best static first video content, you know, using a anything else.

00:48:15:12 - 00:48:27:01
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
But that's the answer to my influencer one I'm happy to see. I see one in here of, what benefits does Unilever see from using MikMak throughout the entire marketing funnel? If they want to go to that one.

00:48:27:03 - 00:48:48:15
Chanté Waters, Unilever
Yeah, sure. Of course. So I think there's a few reasons why. The first is it really provides such strong insight into what channels and audiences are going to drive our highest add to cart rates. Right. It gives us that visibility and transparency so that we can shift not only what activity we're running, but honestly what activity that we're going to create in the future.

00:48:48:17 - 00:49:17:13
Chanté Waters, Unilever
We also have been able to take advantage of MikMak, not just for media, but across our own channels as well. So we really have a connection and a view of what our consumers look like across the funnel, across multiple touchpoints, so that we can build the right audience segments. On that note, I think it's giving us a greater insight into, shopping behaviors, new audiences that we should think about, right?

00:49:17:13 - 00:49:43:07
Chanté Waters, Unilever
How should we nuance our messaging or our creative by different channels? A lot of that, has come out of the learnings that we've had with MikMak And then, the final piece and this was what when I initially had my first, meeting with MikMak years ago, it was the custom audience creation, right? We can be so strategic and so smart about how we're leading our consumer interactions.

00:49:43:07 - 00:49:57:09
Chanté Waters, Unilever
Right? What are we telling them based off of what the what we know. And that's been something that's been really, really helpful to ensure that we have like the right engagement and conversion across our top priority, segments.

00:49:57:11 - 00:50:16:07
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
Thank you. I do see another one, that has come through that is Unilever's Pacific is around Unilever as a healthy budget to explore all channels and realized the paid social has been the area play and given its highest, percent of investment. But what has been the biggest resistance to display ads, if any?

00:50:16:09 - 00:50:38:20
Chanté Waters, Unilever
Oh, so I would say resistance to display is not a big challenge within Unilever overall. Again, it's because of the kind of AI driven measurement approach that we have. So we were able to demystify by a number of different things that I'll frankly say a lot of marketers may know to be true, but you have to constantly validate.

00:50:39:01 - 00:51:08:05
Chanté Waters, Unilever
And one of those is that display works really hard for us, and we know that it does. We also know that similar to TV has a really, really high interaction rate. So we know that we need to we need to pair that exposure with another touchpoint. But the impact of display alone is not just seen with as running, a standalone display campaign, but rather crafting a very intentional media plan of which display increases the effectiveness of our other channels.

00:51:08:07 - 00:51:28:18
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
Thank you very much. I do see one more general Micmac question there that I think I can answer quickly with the time we have left, but just around, you know, audiences first party data is this collected through MikMak or through each brand? It's through MikMak. So you go into the MikMak landing page, we can capture that has an event that's happened at that audience segment, who has opened a MikMak experience.

00:51:28:20 - 00:51:49:12
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
And then further down did they click through to a retailer? You know, we can attach a variables to it and everything. So you can see they specifically clicked on Amazon and they specifically clicked on Sephora. And use that, in your retargeting building lookalike audiences. You can also suppress those audiences. If you want to increase household penetration, make sure you're always reaching new audiences.

00:51:49:18 - 00:52:11:20
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
A lot of different things you can do to it definitely encourage you to ask your, MikMak account people about our different strategies and abilities through, MikMak audiences and everything else we talked about today. But that is all the questions I am seeing in the chat. I really appreciate everyone joining us today. Chat, I really appreciate you, hopping on and joining us on the webinar here.

00:52:11:22 - 00:52:30:12
Michael Rosenfeld, MikMak
It was great hearing, your perspective on what Unilever is up to, how you're leveraging MikMak. I think that is all from us. So again, thank you very much. Thank you, Colleen and Rachel, for hopping on. On the back end, we have Raquel and Tony helping at MikMak as always. Thank you to them. And I hope everyone has a great, day and weekend.