How Publicis helped Sanofi Mexico optimize their ad spend

When Sanofi Mexico, a regional subsidiary of the larger pharmaceutical group, reached out to Publicis to help rebalance their ad spend with Amazon, Publicis immediately posed two important questions: Where are funds currently being allocated? How effectively are those funds working?

To address the first query, Publicis discovered that Sanofi Mexico was placing 30% of their investment in keyword search and 70% into display ads. More simply, the split breaks down to 30% of resources going to lower-funnel solutions that drive conversions, and 70% going to upper-funnel solutions like display.¹ The next step involved assessing the efficacy of that division.

To meet this challenge, Publicis and Amazon Ads used a first-of-its-kind mechanism developed by Publicis, leveraging the Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) to serve as a bank of insights, a digital channel, and a thought leadership program. By combining first- and third-party Amazon Ads insights, the Publicis Tech Infrastructure hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) unifies multiple Amazon insights, including retail and media signals to focus on business outcomes.

The idea behind the mechanism is to create an entry point to AMC that doesn’t require high-level understanding of the AWS cloud services or structured query language. With this Publicis Tech Infrastructure, customers are able to measure upper- and mid-funnel initiatives and understand the true media return on ad spend (ROAS) of marketing efforts, regardless of where they are in the funnel.

In their initial measurement, Publicis found that despite the 30-70 split, the balance of the two advertising solutions were inverted. Search formats (including Sponsored Display, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Products ads) generated 85% of conversions and 82% of weighted ROAS. While Publicis noted to Sanofi Mexico that Amazon DSP was still an efficient method of generating reach, they also indicated that capping frequency on upper-funnel spending could help optimize campaign results, while freeing up budget to spend on more effective means.

Of course, projections require a test-and-learn period to assess whether the hypothesis is as useful in practice as it is in theory. Publicis launched a test-and-learn program with a revisited budget that accounted for a different media mix, as well as frequency capping that took efficacy into larger consideration. Publicis recommended a 15% to 30% allocation for Amazon DSP and a 70% to 80% allocation for search.²

With the suggestion to reallocate budget and shift priorities, Sanofi Mexico had a sales increase of 35% with less budget used than in previous campaigns. The brand also saw their ROAS grow to 5%, which is 250% higher than the category benchmark.³

“Sanofi Mexico is always looking for new ways to reach patients and consumers. This is the first time we made use of the Amazon Marketing Cloud and its capacity to look at the performance of our campaigns on the user level and with a custom attribution approach,” said Mariana Trejo Roa, head of e-commerce at Sanofi Mexico. “The global Sanofi Executive Committee team and Publicis Commerce supported us in identifying the perfect budget mix between search and DSP for each of our brands, as well as the ideal retargeting frequency. We are now also able to tell whether our media mix allows us to recruit new shoppers to our brands.”

As the brand continues to assess the efficacy of their ad spend, Publicis has recommended that Sanofi Mexico continue to test and learn to see how customers respond to their advertising and where in the funnel is best to spend their budget. Publicis also recommended a campaign mix analysis to assess which campaign type combination is most effective.