How California lifestyle brand O’Neill drives revenue and efficiency at scale

O’Neill, the original California surf, snow and lifestyle brand, was founded in 1952 when a young man named Jack O’Neill took his unstoppable passion for surfing and used it to battle Mother Nature by inventing the wetsuit. He “just wanted to surf longer.” Even today, O’Neill’s collection of casual, swim and beach wear is inspired by Jack’s love for the ocean. Featuring the O’Neill Blue collection, the brand also demonstrates a commitment to using sustainable materials that protect the oceans.

From a marketing perspective, O’Neill is data-driven and detail-oriented when activating campaigns against their marketing objectives. O’Neill was looking for a partner to consolidate and scale their display advertising across multiple environments in key markets like the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Germany, while maintaining a stable cost of sale (COS). They partnered with Criteo to deliver dynamic ads across the consumer journey while maintaining efficient performance through automated bidding.

O’Neill’s Marketing Manager, Dennis van Rooden says, “What I really like about Criteo is that we can deliver good performance whilst using different kinds of automation. I really value this because ultimately we want to operate at scale.”

Making waves across the consumer journey

O’Neill’s partnership with Criteo is focused on dynamic ads that convert new site visitors into customers and upsell their existing customer base.

Criteo’s dynamic ads are powered by data pooled from two billion monthly active shoppers and 100+ shopper intent signals to engage consumers at the right time and with the right product. Then AI technology continuously learns and optimizes campaign performance.

Dennis explains, “Delivering at scale is really important. If I compare it to working with other providers such as Google Retargeting, the performance [of Google] is not as good and the scale is also limited. What I also like about Criteo is that it’s easy to use… it made it really easy to link up to your technology and kick off. It just works!”

Criteo created dynamic campaigns that increased the number of purchases made by both new and existing customers. Dennis elaborates, “Where Criteo really helps is by converting visitors into customers. So, from an acquisition perspective it’s doing a really good job… We’re very good at driving traffic to our website… but that’s not always the time that we sell our products. That’s where Criteo comes into play by harvesting the actions that we have been doing.”

Achieving performance in all seasons

O’Neill also increased campaign efficiency with Criteo’s automated bidding tool. Automated bidding allows O’Neill to maximize the returns of their campaigns at a scale not achievable when manually adjusting cost-per-clicks (CPCs). And it does this while maintaining a stable cost of sale. This ensures O’Neill’s campaigns deliver the highest possible sales and revenue at a pre-determined return on ad spend (ROAS).

Criteo’s automated bidding tool also amplifies O’Neill’s seasonal marketing efforts. Dennis details, “If I look back since we started using the automated bidding functionalities, I see that it delivers the right figures in terms of our seasonality trend. We see that the model understands how it needs to optimize itself based on demand in the marketplace.”

He goes on to say, “If I look at the campaign performance over a longer time frame, the campaign KPI is always being achieved and this is exactly what I would expect from managing the campaign myself but of course I don’t want to have to spend so much time on it.”

*Metrics shown above compare performance from Criteo to previous partner Google Retargeting. Reporting is from Google Analytics (30-day conversion window) YoY comparison of the client’s key winter period.