Laboratoires Pierre Fabre uncovers deep customer persona insights in data clean room collaboration on universal IDs with multiple publishers

French pharmaceutical and dermo-cosmetic group Laboratoires Pierre Fabre wanted to find out more about the customer personas for their Avène and Aderma sunscreen brands. The insights they gained through this persona research would help them produce better ad creatives and improve their ad targeting.

Since the brands’ products are primarily sold in retail stores, the group didn’t have as much insight into the traits and behaviors of customers as brands who sell their products directly to customers. However, they did have identifiers (IDs) from visitors to the brands’ websites, made possible by French ID solution provider First-id. First-id enabled Laboratoires Pierre Fabre to gather IDs from any website visitor — even if they weren’t logged in.

Still, the IDs on their own were not enough to provide context about the type of person who were interested in one brand of sunscreen or the other — or if this differed at all. 

An ideal way to find out more about the characteristics of these customers was to see how they were represented in the pre-existing segments many publishers use to target readers. These could be categories such as “sport enthusiasts”, “young parents”, or “travel lovers”, for example.

But to stay compliant with privacy regulations and to keep their competitive edge, Pierre Fabre needed a solution that allowed them to find out more about how their customers fit into such categories without letting the customer IDs be visible to any publisher collaborator. The advertiser selected Decentriq’s data clean rooms for their ability to guarantee the generation of audience insights without any sharing of data.

Laboratoires Pierre Fabre matched its IDs in Decentriq data clean rooms with three publishers who also onboarded First-id  — Reworld Media, Groupe Marie-Claire, and Média Figaro — and the existing segmentations they had for their audiences. The publishers’ content differed significantly from one another, meaning they were able to offer complementary audience insights. 

At the end of the collaboration, the cosmetics group had a dashboard for each publisher, where they could see which top segments were occupied by which brand’s customers.

The analysis was carried out on three audiences with the support of their agency, Publicis Media France:

1) ID only at Avène

2) ID only at Aderma

3) ID common to both brands

The process to match the IDs of Laboratoires Pierre Fabre with the three publishers’ audience segments took less than one month to deliver very rich insights regarding customer personas in addition to the central important finding: There was a significant difference between the two customer groups.

Some of the detailed insights revealed included that Avène customers tended to concentrate on the dermatological effectiveness of products, whereas Aderma customers prioritized sustainability and organic products, for example.

Armed with such strong results, Pierre Fabre has accomplished its goal of finding out more about what types of advertising will work best for the Avène and Aderma brands. The group also has plans on how to leverage similar findings to inform its future advertising strategies as well, including:

• Replicating the process with other brands and product ranges to broaden Pierre Fabre's knowledge of targets
• Enriching their CRM with qualified data from publishers
• Activating acquisition and awareness media campaigns on these audiences
• Personalizing creatives and messaging based on the enriched personas