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The unique opportunity of Scan as you Shop media

  Salvatore Pendino, 

From Connected Display through to experiential marketing, there are a number of ways to reach and engage with customers across Tesco stores. What if you wanted to reach customers who aren’t browsing in the aisle your product features in? Or if you wanted to give customers multiple opportunities to see your product as they build their basket in store?

This is where Scan as you Shop (SAYS) media comes in. It’s one of the newest and most exciting additions to the Tesco Media & Insight Platform that – quite literally – puts your ads into the palms of customers’ hands.

real time-saver, track spending and benefit from Clubcard Prices - Tesco Media and Insight Platform

If you shop in larger Tesco stores, there’s a good chance you’ve already seen SAYS handsets in action; you may have even used one yourself. If you're yet to try one, Scan as You Shop handsets are a really easy to use mobile barcode reader that you collect from the front of the store with a quick scan of your Clubcard. As you browse the aisles you scan each product as you add it to your basket or trolley, which not only saves loads of time at the checkout, but also allows you to keep an eye on your total bill and how much money you’re saving with Clubcard Prices offers. When you’re done, you simply scan a final barcode at any Self-Service till and pay.

Tesco customers really love Scan as you Shop for three main reasons:

  1. It’s a real time-saver
    A quick and easy shopping experience is always welcome. With SAYS, customers can scan products on the go and then put them straight into their bag. There’s no need to unload everything onto a conveyor belt or checkout station, making it an incredibly easy way to shop.
  2. Customers can track their spending
    Many shoppers are cost-conscious at the moment; in fact, eight out of 10 Tesco customers say they’ve changed their shopping habits due to inflation1. SAYS gives users an easy way to keep track of the cost of their basket, contnuously displaying a running total.
  3. Users benefit from Clubcard Prices
    The only requirement for someone to use a SAYS handset is for them to have a Tesco Clubcard. Because of that, not only do they collect one Clubcard point for every pound they spend, but they also get access to the exclusive Clubcard Prices that apply to a vast number of products.
Scan as you Shop at Tesco

These benefits are helping to boost the popularity of SAYS among shoppers. The media-enabled handsets can now be found in 359 Tesco stores across the country and this advertising network has grown by 35% since November 2023. Over 10m transactions take place via SAYS every month and around 200k customers use them each month are first-time users. The popularity and audience for SAYS is continually growing – and across all demographics. 30% of SAYS customers are older adults, 22% older families, and 21% young families.

The SAYS audience is special, too. The average basket value for a SAYS customer is typically 53% higher than a comparable Tesco Extra basket, and a whopping 86% higher than a Tesco Superstore basket. Across our large store formats, that equates to an average SAYS basket value of £52, comprising an average of 26 items.

High-impact placements, designed to be noticed.

This high-value audience is particularly relevant to brand advertisers due to the addition of impactful new media opportunities on SAYS handsets. SAYS media campaigns can now be booked across a package of two extremely visible display banner placements: Splash Ads and Basket Banners.

  • Splash Ads appear at the start of a customer’s shopping trip. These full screen ads appear from the moment a handset is released from its cradle and remain visible until a customer scans their first product or opts to close the ad by tapping an onscreen “x” icon.
  • Banner ads appear throughout the shopping trip. These appear for 60-seconds each and occupy around a fifth of the screen, refreshing multiple times during the journey – providing customers with multiple opportunities to see your product during their time in store.
SAYS: Splash Ads and Basket Banners

Like the many other channels that make up our Connected Store proposition, these high-impact placements help brands to tackle the challenge of ‘sleep shopping’. Customers routinely buying the same items, week in week out, is a concern for any brand that wants to break habits, get noticed, and launch new products, which makes the kind of creative canvas that SAYS handsets are part of all the more critical.

The disruptive nature of SAYS resonates with shoppers, too. In one recent study, we found that 85% of Tesco customers are proactively looking for recipe inspiration, with an identical number also making spontaneous decisions about what to buy when they’re in store. SAYS media not only provides a way to spark the shoppers’ imaginations; it does so wherever they are in store, too.

 

Clubcard integration brings clarity and certainty.

Right now, the opportunity presented by SAYS media is truly unique. Across both the UK and Ireland, Tesco is the only retailer to offer this kind of media placement and at scale. As these adverts are new, SAYS media is a real attention-grabber. That, combined with an already high level of engagement with the handsets, helps to maximise reach and impressions.

That’s not the only exceptional thing about SAYS media, however. Because customers need to scan their Clubcard to activate a handset, the performance of SAYS campaigns can be measured in fully closed loop. Brands can see for sure whether the customers they reached with their adverts bought the featured items, as well as if they then went on to purchase that item online, and even if someone is making a new or repeat purchase.

This kind of granularity doesn’t just help with performance indicators like return on advertising spend (ROAS), though – it gives brands the ability to create better and sharper future campaigns as well. Through one recent SAYS media activation, for example, one of our brand partners was able to deliver:

  • A ROAS value of 5:1.
  • £104k in associated brand product sales.
  • 27.4k brand customer conversions, 11% of whom were ‘new to brand’ customers.

If you’d like to know what Scan as you Shop media campaigns could do for your own brand, please get in touch.

 

1 dunnhumby Shopper Thoughts – June 2022