The Company REWE Group is one of Europe’s largest international retailers with 380,000 employees across 21 countries, multiple stores, and a variety of brands focused on grocery retail, hypermarkets, discount stores, and tourism services.
In a media-inflated market and fragmented journeys, REWE excels by uniting offline and online signals for precise targeting and measurable growth, keeping experiences consistent and privacy-compliant, and further supported by launching its own high-engagement loyalty programme.
The Challenge REWE’s teams had a clear objective: reduce waste in their media spend and expand acquisition efficiently. But three structural issues threatened to stand in the way.
- Low match rates blocked effective audience suppression. Even with rich first-party data, only a fraction of REWE’s known customers were matched on paid channels. As a result, audiences that should have been excluded were still receiving impressions, creating overlap, inflating costs, and making it difficult to reduce redundant reach at scale.
- Existing modelling approaches lacked the consistency needed to support efficient acquisition at scale. REWE needed a more reliable way to identify and reach high-potential new customers, so media investment could be focused on audiences with stronger conversion potential rather than broad, less precise segments.
- Operational bottlenecks and knowledge gaps threatened to hinder execution. To scale effectively, REWE needed to ensure that decentralised teams could navigate Zeotap freely and activate audiences without constant reliance on a central technical core team.
Combined, these factors created a strategic barrier: REWE couldn’t reliably suppress known audiences to reduce waste, nor accurately reach the high-potential customers needed to fuel growth.
The Solution REWE selected Zeotap as its strategic partner to build a more accurate and scalable approach to acquisition. Leveraging Zeotap’s platform, REWE implemented a set of targeted solutions:
- Unified consented web, app, and CRM data into single activation-ready customer profiles.
- Increased match rates across paid media channels.
- Enabled consistent audience suppression by reliably identifying and excluding known customers from paid campaigns.
- Improved budget allocation by shifting spend from broad segments to audiences with higher conversion potential.
“With Zeotap, we can activate new media channels with first‑party data in a very short time. Thanks to the user‑friendly interface, even users without deep technical expertise gain immediate access to our customer data”
Damian Jeger, Lead Marketing Technology, REWE GROUP
Strategic Internal Enablement: The Audience Architect Program (AAP) To address the challenge of internal operational complexity, REWE leveraged the AAP. This structured process ensured Zeotap would be used securely, uniformly, and effectively across all internal teams and external agencies.
- Train-the-Trainer Approach: REWE empowered key platform users to act as central multipliers, scaling knowledge across the organisation and reducing dependency on the core technical team.
- The Variable Catalogue: REWE developed a central “Variable Catalogue” that acts as a navigation map for all users. It documents data sources, update frequencies, and definitions, allowing marketers to independently identify the right attributes for any campaign.
- Standardisation & Governance: The program established mandatory naming conventions and strict data privacy guardrails, ensuring every audience created is compliant and easy to manage.
- Wave-Based Rollout: Training was delivered in five strategic waves, moving from the internal core team to external agency partners to ensure a unified understanding across the entire ecosystem.
The results The collaboration between REWE and Zeotap was decisive, delivering a measurable boost to media performance. REWE achieved:
- Selected campaigns achieved media efficiency gains of over 4% through improved audience suppression.
- Driving Self-Sufficiency: Successfully onboarded and empowered over 70 active users on the Zeotap platform, reducing dependency on the core technical team
- Privacy-first scaling: Secured compliance as a central anchor across all campaigns
These efficiencies enabled the team to reinvest in its highest-performing segments, driving additional growth and stronger ROI. Consequently, Zeotap became an important component in REWE’s broader first-party-data activation strategy.
“By using Zeotap, we significantly increase conversion rates and efficiency, translating precise targeting directly into measurable business impact”
Damian Jeger, Lead Marketing Technology, REWE GROUP
Conclusion REWE’s partnership with Zeotap has reshaped its approach to media investment. Instead of relying on broad reach for scale, the team now operates with precision, suppressing redundant impressions and expanding acquisition, all within a privacy-first framework.
This shift has created smarter spend, stronger performance, and a more resilient foundation for future growth which has since also been translated into dedicated own channel initiatives across email and app.
“We use Zeotap to demonstrably translate the value of our own data into cross‑channel impact”
Damian Jeger, Lead Marketing Technology, REWE GROUP
“By using Zeotap, we significantly increase conversion rates and efficiency, translating precise targeting directly into measurable business impact”
