Samsung Canada, in preparation for the deprecation of cookies, recently created the Samsung Sales Measurement (SSM), in partnership with The Trade Desk. And so far, according to Christian Di Vincenzo, Samsung Electronics senior manager digital marketing, it’s helped the company to improve its ability to attribute media to sales by 19 times.

SSM, says Di Vincenzo, has also improved Samsung’s ability to understand its audience and inform where to shift budgets and plan more effective ad campaigns.

“Whenever we’ve been planning and buying media, we’ve only been able to attribute sales to purchases made through Samsung directly. So, through our Samsung website and Samsung stores, because we own that data, we own that customer. But when we sell through Rogers, or Best Buy or a retailer, we’ve always been one step removed,” he adds.

Samsung Canada previously tied its digital ad strategies to direct brand sales, but its media optimization only focused on Samsung.com, totally missing offline retail sales. So, working with Starcom Canada, Track and The Trade Desk’s demand-side platform, Samsung looked for a way to better attribute both online and offline sales to media.

SSM was created for campaigns promoting the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip5 and Galaxy Z Fold5, which ran August 10 to September 10, 2023 and were planned through The Trade Desk. The advertising targeted Millennials and Gen Z using a combination of audience segments from first-party data, website visitors along with key lifestyle and device segments.

Samsung Electronics’ first-party data comes from Canadian customers who opt in to marketing when registering their product (from smartphones and tablets to connected TVs and refrigerator) through a Samsung account, providing privacy-compliant first-party data for Samsung. The email used to register a Samsung account is then converted to an anonymized UID2 token with The Trade Desk.

The custom programmatic solution leverages Samsung’s first-party sales data to better understand the customer journey, according to the company. The SSM process involves Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) – The Trade Desk’s conversion API and identity solution – which integrates opted-in consumer data. It allows Samsung Canada to trace and enhance the path to conversion and improve media targeting and creative strategy via personalization.