Marketing UnLearned – Détails, épisodes et analyse

In this episode of Marketing Unlearned, we dive into the transformative world of digital marketing strategies with a focus on retail media at John Lewis. Join Ian Jindal as he converses with Jemms, Kaitlin  and Vic, who share their insights on evolving retail media capabilities, the importance of a win-win-win approach, and the challenges of integrating new technologies. Discover how John Lewis is leading the charge in digital performance marketing and what it means for the future of retail media. Tune in for an engaging discussion on innovation, strategy, and the exciting opportunities in the retail media landscape.

Who, what, where?

- Jemma Haley, Retail Media Business & Proposition Strategy at The John Lewis Partnership
- Kaitlin Craig, Retail Media Proposition Manager (Digital Channels) at John Lewis and Waitrose
- Victoria Peopall, Client Success Director, Epsilon Retail Media
- Ian Jindal, Founder at RetailX

- RetailX (research and executive network at www.retailx.net; events and podcasting at www.retailx.events)
- Epsilon - www.epsilon.com
- Media partner, InternetRetailing, at www.internetretailing.net

Ian Jindal discusses the evolution of retail media with Alice Anson, Director of Digital (Retail) Media for Nectar 360 and Leila Sheridan, Enterprise Sales Director, Epsilon.

Alice explains Nectar 360's role within the Sainsbury's Group, leveraging first-party data from 23 million Nectar users for targeted campaigns. She highlights the increasing interactivity and data capture from in-store digital touchpoints such as interactive screens and scan-as-you-shop technology.

This episode also focuses on the limitations of return on advertising spend (ROAS) as a sole metric for retail media success, advocating instead for measures like incrementality, category growth, and a more full-funnel thinking approach that connects online and offline customer journeys and accounts for long-term brand building and customer loyalty, with a nod to how AI might enhance future measurement and strategy.

Epsilon's Leila Sheridan, Enterprise Sales Director, and Ben Foulkes, VP Digital, join Ian Jindal to launch a new podcast series Marketing Unlearned.

The hosts aim to challenge existing notions in digital marketing and retail media, exploring how rapid changes in technology and process are impacting the sector. They discuss topics such as metrics like ROAS, whether retail media applies to B2B, pricing strategies, the future of TV advertising, and the effectiveness of retail media for brands, inviting guest experts to provide insights and "unpick" these complex areas.

In this episode of Marketing Un:Learned, Ian Jindal welcomes back Florian Clemens, who leads strategy, proposition and measurement for Tesco Media and Network. Following his appearance on RetailCraft, Florian returns to unpack four core assumptions that retail media practitioners need to challenge—and to share what he has learned by testing, experimenting, and building one of the UK's most sophisticated omnichannel retail media platforms on top of Tesco's 24 million Clubcard customer base.

About the Guest

Florian Clemens leads strategy, proposition, and measurement at Tesco Media and Network, where he drives a multi-year growth strategy, competitive positioning for the brand, and performance budgets, as well as client-facing measurement frameworks. He has been working in retail media since 2014, when he joined Amazon Ads and built the global accounts team. Before entering retail media, he served as a brand manager at P&G and Danone, providing him with a unique perspective from both sides of the purchase order.

Episode Outline & Key Topics

Does advertising make the retail experience worse?[03:35]

Florian challenges the assumption that advertising is an intrusion that shoppers must endure. He introduces Tesco's "win-win-win" framework—creating value for the shopper, the advertiser and the retailer simultaneously. Examples include Cadbury Christmas grottoes outside stores (physical, experiential activations that delight families while delivering extended brand engagement), Moretti sponsoring Italian recipes on Tesco Real Food (where surveys showed improved shopper experience and brand equity lift), and research showing two-thirds of shoppers find Disney+ ads at the snacking aisle completely relevant and normal.

Is advertising something that shoppers passively suffer?[13:52]

Moving beyond the idea that advertising is a cognitive overhead, Florian explains Tesco's Clubcard Challenges—a gamified loyalty programme where shoppers select up to 10 brands they've bought before, set personalised spend milestones over six weeks, and earn escalating Clubcard points. Shoppers are in control, advertisers only pay when customers hit spend thresholds, and the mechanic blends performance, loyalty and engagement in a transparent, shopper-first way.

Is relevance the most important factor?[21:35]

Florian's counterintuitive argument: "100% relevance equals 0% incrementality." While search results must be relevant (someone searching for Gillette razors expects Gillette results), pure relevance risks becoming a self-fulfilling loop with no room for inspiration, discovery or brand building. Tesco has introduced "conquesting" (bidding on competitor brand terms with visually separate banner ads), audience targeting based on lifetime behaviour rather than in-session intent, and research into when and where to inject inspiration without degrading experience—balancing relevance with incrementality on both an X and Y axis.

Is it all about monetisation?[31:16]

Florian introduces "Smart Stock Audiences"—a Unilever co-test where Tesco suppresses ads for categories shoppers have just purchased (e.g., if you bought mayonnaise last weekend, you won't see Hellmann's ads this week). This prioritises shopper experience and advertiser efficiency over maximum ad serving, using Dunnhumby's 30 years of predictive data science to create audiences around high-propensity trialists, future decliners and recently stocked households—all processed in aggregate to remain 100% privacy-safe.

Key Insights & Quotes

"If someone searches for Gillette shaving blades and gets an ad for Gillette shaving blades and buys the Gillette shaving blades, what have we done here? It's amazing ROAS, but not really ROI." 

"Is relevance and inspiration not the opposing sides of a continuum, but actually an x-axis and a y-axis?" 

"There might be some times when it's better not to serve an ad… if they've just bought a big jar of mayonnaise this weekend, this might not be the time to advertise more mayonnaise." 

"It's called relevance, not relevancy. I don't know how some people keep calling it that." 

Florian and Ian also explore the strategic planning process behind Tesco's omnichannel campaigns, how the team pitches for advertiser budgets alongside major UK media platforms, the role of A/B testing and shopper surveys in balancing monetisation with experience, and how Clubcard's scale and Dunnhumby's data science enable sophisticated audience strategies that work in aggregate without compromising individual privacy.

Resources & Links

• Tesco Media and Network - https://www.dunnhumby.com/tesco-media-insight-platform/
• RetailCraft podcast - Florian's previous episode 
• Florian on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/florianclemens/
• Ian Jindal on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianjindal
• Epsilon on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/company/epsilon/ 

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About Marketing Un:Learned

Marketing Un:Learned explores the challenges that leading-edge digital marketing poses to established and received wisdom. All new initiatives face scrutiny—the "what-abouts," statements of inertia, and deprioritising questions. In this series, we take those challenges head-on and learn how exemplars deliver persuasively, perhaps changing our thinking along the way. In partnership with Epsilon, we focus on innovation in retail media, digital advertising, CRM and personalisation, speaking with expert practitioners who have moved beyond optimised, well-known processes.

In this episode, Ian Jindal talks with Raine Peake, Group Digital Director at Crew Clothing Company, about how a portfolio of British heritage brands is adapting to a fast-changing digital and retail environment. The discussion covers what needs to be unlearned about discounting, channels, content and customer value, and what a more modern, test-and-learn approach looks like in practice.

Raine Peake is Group Digital Director at Crew Clothing Company, responsible for digital strategy, e-commerce trading, digital marketing and optimisation across Crew Clothing, Ben Sherman, Saltrock and Pringle of Scotland. Her experience spans Farfetch (through to IPO), New Look, Mint Velvet and Jigsaw, grounded in an early merchandising career in bricks-and-mortar retail.

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Chapters / Topics

00:00 – Introductions, Role and Brand Portfolio

Raine, who outlines her role as Group Digital Director and the brands in the portfolio:

• Crew Clothing: a heritage British coastal lifestyle brand with over 100 UK stores and an online presence.
• Saltrock: surfing heritage brand with around 70 stores, mainly in the South West.
• Ben Sherman: long-established British menswear brand rooted in shirt-making and youth culture.
• Pringle of Scotland: Scottish knitwear brand with over 200 years of history, known for cashmere and argyle.

Raine explains how each brand maintains its own identity while benefiting from shared learnings and capabilities at the group level.

02:40 – Career Path and Farfetch Influence

Raine talks through her route to Crew: New Look, Mint Velvet, Jigsaw and especially Farfetch through IPO, plus her beginnings in merchandising with pen-and-ledger retail. This mix of commercial and tech-led environment informs her approach to digital and marketing today, with a bias to experimentation and analytics.

04:45 – Heritage Brands in a Modern Age

The conversation turns to what it means to work with genuine heritage brands versus "fake heritage", and why heritage alone isn't enough. Crew and the group have shifted from assuming customers know their story to explicitly telling it: focusing on origins in Salcombe, coastal and sporting roots, and material and construction details of core products.

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Brand Storytelling and Authenticity (Approx. 09:10)

Raine describes how the portfolio has moved to much more explicit brand storytelling online. That includes:

• Highlighting core categories (men's half-zips, polos, women's knitwear) and explaining why their version is worth choosing.
• Using consistent, always-on brand-led content, on the basis that new customers are seeing it for the first time.
• Connecting digital communications with sponsorships (LTA, Henley, England Rugby's Red Roses) and Crew's coastal/sport positioning.

With Pringle of Scotland, the group is at an earlier stage, exploring how to retell a long heritage story and link Scottish manufacturing and historic prestige with contemporary relevance and accessibility.

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Testing and Channels

05:55 – Testing by Region: Meta, TikTok, YouTube

Raine explains splitting the UK into four regions with broadly similar population and digital revenue to test different mid- and upper-funnel strategies with Nest Commerce across Meta, TikTok and YouTube. All areas with additional top-of-funnel spend outperformed a control, validating the approach.

08:10 – Content Volume and "Greedy" Platforms

To support this, the team had to roughly double content output, from basic sales assets to influencer-led and brand storytelling videos. Raine notes that platforms are "greedy", and having more creative variants in play generally increases performance opportunities.

09:45 – YouTube and Connected TV Discovery

The tests showed YouTube delivering the clearest uplift, with statistically significant gains over other channels. A key insight was that their mainly 35+ audience overindexed on watching YouTube on Connected TV rather than on laptops or mobile devices, aligning with broader shifts in TV-screen video consumption and shoppable CTV.

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Managing Multiple Heritage Brands (Approx. 11:20–13:00)

Raine explains how the group keeps Crew, Saltrock, Ben Sherman and Pringle distinct:

• Separate teams and locations (e.g. Ben Sherman marketing in Kingston and product in Leeds; Saltrock centred in the South West surf community).
• Expectation that teams "live" the brand (Saltrock staff surf; Crew leans into coastal and sporting lifestyles).
• Avoiding visual and tonal "bleed" between brands while sharing what works operationally or strategically.

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Gamification and Operations (Approx. 17:00)

Raine draws on her time at Jigsaw to describe how to gamify ship-from-store fulfilment. Features include:

• Speed-to-fulfil metrics and leaderboards.
• Order acceptance/decline race dynamics.
• Clear timelines to match rising delivery expectations.

She emphasises that gamification must be paired with tangible rewards such as store bonuses; otherwise, it risks being perceived as added pressure rather than engagement.

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Promotions, Black Friday and "Fake Friday"

20:30–21:30 – "Fake Friday" and Black Friday Setup

Raine explains how "Fake Friday" (the Friday before Black Friday, when traffic spikes) acts as a natural live test. Crew leaned into this with lower-level discounts and archive sale emails, gaining insight into messaging and customer responsiveness ahead of the main event.

21:30 – Black Friday: Removing the Numbers

In Black Friday week, a complex mix of 30%/40% discounts underperformed due to heavy competition, noisy messaging, and customer confusion. The team then:

• Removed percentage figures from subject lines and selected ads.
• Switched to more verbal phrasing, such as "Best sale ever" and "half price" rather than "50% off".
• Built on earlier "no percentage" archive sale tests from Fake Friday.

This change improved engagement and delivered a strong Black Friday performance, illustrating that messaging clarity and distinctiveness can outperform marginally higher or more explicit discounts in a crowded market.

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Customer Value and Segmentation (Approx. 24:20–25:10)

Raine outlines a shift from pure monetary VIP segmentation towards frequency-based tiers. Key points:

• A customer spending £100 across four orders is treated as a higher priority than a single £100-orde...