MarTech Meets AdTech: How Sargento’s Award-Winning MarTech Stack Came to Be
We’re always proud to share the good news about our customers, especially when they’re doing great things with our technology!
Sargento won a 2019 MarTech Stackie Award for best marketing technology (martech) stack design. While MarTech Today spotlighted the story of how Sargento cooked up their stack, I had the chance to meet with Cami Schenck, the senior marketing manager of media and digital at Sargento Foods to learn more about the secret ingredients.
For those who don’t know Sargento, they’re the “real cheese people,” the Wisconsin-based maker of premium cheese products. If you like packaged shredded cheese and cheese packages with zippers, thank Sargento for introducing both to the world.
Their tech stack is a brilliant depiction of how MarTech + AdTech can create an omnichannel customer experience.
How it came to be
“The MarTech Stackie contest inspired us to develop our own stack illustration, and it serves as a reference point as we talk about our ongoing data strategy evolution.” Cami Schenck, Senior Marketing Manager – Media and Digital at Sargento Foods |
Sargento has been undergoing a digital transformation across their marketing organization. Drawing out their marketing tech stack proved to be a powerful tool for aligning internal stakeholders and their marketing team. It helps them understand how they use different technology solutions at different phases within the marketing process.
There are four phases to Sargento’s content lifecycle
Acquia DAM (formerly Widen) is a foundational tool in Sargent’s “create” phase.
The PLAN phase carries their digital media and audience strategy, and it’s predominantly driven by their Insights and Digital Marketing team.
The CREATE phase is driven by the Creative team, which is developing the content.
The ACTIVATE phase is largely executed by the Marketing and E-commerce team.
And, the MEASURE phase is largely driven by Marketing, but with Insights, E-Commerce, Sales, and Creative all working towards continuous performance improvements.
The starting point for Sargento's martech stack analysis was to determine how to add a data management platform and customer relationship management (CRM) solution.
The discovery phase of their overall data strategy – which called for auditing and identifying current data sources – helped them plot all of the connections between their systems and decide how each technology would contribute to the consumer journey.
Finding all of the connection points and laying it out in a thoughtful way helped internal stakeholders and external partners understand how these technologies are working together, so they can be as efficient and effective as possible.
| “We knew there was an opportunity to become more data driven and ultimately improve audience segmentation to create media and content efficiencies, cost efficiencies, and use the power of data to breakdown our “cheese silos” in order to activate Sargento’s go-to-market strategy as a whole.” |
That translated into building and launching a new data management platform to fully leverage their existing customer and consumer data, while establishing a plan to improve data intakes and subsequent use across the organization.
As a consumer packaged goods company Sargento doesn’t own the transactional data — they build mutually beneficial data deals with their retailers. The trades help Sargento deliver marketing experiences that are relevant to consumers and cognizant of where they shop, whether that’s online or in person.
Their personalization strategy is not one-to-one or one-to-many. It’s more like one-to-microsegment, with lots of different consumer segments. Such microsegments might include busy working parents with young children in the Midwest or empty nester foodies in the Northeast.
| “Whether you’re looking for product information, recipe ideas, or ways to improve your snacking or your meal occasions, we want to make sure we’re sharing the product that will be most relevant to our consumers.” |
Sargento’s current marketing campaign, “The Power of Real”, recognizes that food has the potential to bring people together over things that really matter. Their emails seed recipes, event ideas, excuses for family gatherings, and other information that can help recipients create those real moments – mainly, by eating delicious food with people they care about.
| “We are building a scalable foundation for a unified data and audience strategy that supports a holistic consumer journey.” |
Acquia’s role in Sargento’s martech stack
Acquia DAM (Widen) is the single source of truth for packaging, images, display ads, print ads, video, and TV spots.
DAM has been a critical component for content syndication in the e-commerce space, along with Salsify, a product information system (PIM) for e-commerce. Acquia’s digital asset management (DAM) system integrates with Salsify via an API, so Salsify gets the right imagery to retailers and agency partners in any format they need.
They’re also syndicating content to retailers like Kroger and Walmart and online grocery delivery services like InstaCart and Peapod.
Acquia DAM (formerly Widen) and Salsify help Sargento deliver content to retailers and delivery services.
Before their partnerships with Acquia and Salsify came to be, thousands of images were spread across multiple servers, and it was difficult to get content to all the marketing, sales, and agency partners in a timely manner. They had a lot of duplicate efforts. The biggest challenge was that content showed up poorly on retailer websites because the legacy systems were not intended for consumer-facing e-commerce sites.
Since then, Sargento has taken its imagery to the next level, and they’re working to provide more information and make products more searchable in a more automated way.
| “We have thousands of images that we need to be able to syndicate, manage, and leverage. Not uploading content in two different systems is hugely beneficial for us. It’s how we protect the integrity of our brand.” |
So, what has been the outcome for Sargento? Well, it’s all in that clever yet literally cheesy award-winning stack. Sargento’s now has the ability to plan its digital audience and media strategy, develop creative content, execute its campaigns for cheese lovers, and measure its performance continuously, all without letting data leak out.
Now that’s a martech recipe we should all be cooking.
If you’re interested in learning more about how Acquia DAM can support your martech stack, request, watch, or click through a demo today.
Note: This article was originally published on Widen.com.
Vice President, Sales and Go-To-Market, DAM and PIM Acquia
