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How toymaker Coco Village achieved a 1,000 percent return on ad spend after incorporating UID 2.0

A laptop with keys missing shows a green screen with a cookie on it.

Illustration by Sarah Kim / Coco Village /Getty / The Current

Coco Village, a high-end children’s furniture, décor, apparel, and toy company, has ambitions to take its brand global, but also has concerns as to how the looming phase out of third-party cookies will impact its long-term plans.

Although the family-owned e-commerce company has a robust following on social, with nearly 300,000 followers on Instagram and more than 400,000 on Facebook, Coco Village must continue to find new customers (young parents) to warrant its expansion into other markets. Canada-based Coco Village expanded to the U.S. a year ago, and recently, began selling its Scandinavian and European inspired products in international markets after future-proofing its identity strategy in North America by adopting Unified ID 2.0.

Early results reveal a promising future. Through UID 2.0, the company was able to reach new potential customers thanks to a 40 percent lift in incremental reach. The almighty return on ad spend, meanwhile, rose a staggering 1,000 percent through UID 2.0, the company says.

“Our expectations were not high, but we wanted to give UID a shot because third-party cookies are going away so we needed to solve for identity if we were going to go international,” Guillaume Dalle, programmatic specialist at Coco Village, tells The Current. “And we were pleasantly surprised with the results.” 

Like nearly all brands, Coco Village uses third-party cookies to track website visitors and collect data that helps them target existing customers and similar audiences. But the cookie’s looming demise poses a challenge for the brand and its growth plans. 

The proactive steps taken by brands such as Coco Village and Made In, however, underscore that solving for identity can not only be simple, but it can also help solve long-term strategic goals, like entering new markets. “Using Unified ID was really much easier than I was expecting,” says Dalle, who adds that the process to implement UID 2.0 took about two days. “We basically just uploaded our CRM list, and it was ready to run.” 

Dalle says Coco Village shared its results to help educate other brands on the simplicity and potential of UID 2.0. “I feel larger brands are not doing this yet because they are stuck in their habits,” he says. “‘Programmatic’ is not something you can learn in school. So, it’s important to communicate the results and show the possibilities to the rest of the industry.” 

Coco Village, which was founded by parents Yoann Desrosiers and Dominik Larose, designs its handcrafted products in-house. The company captures first-party data from potential customers by offering new customers who visit its website 10 percent off for sharing their email, for example. Dalle says he works in lockstep with the company’s social and search marketing teams. The company plans to soon incorporate geotargeting into its media mix and launch new videos to raise awareness of its brand. “The way we are using programmatic is to raise awareness and reach people who do not know about Coco Village,” says Dalle. “Facebook, or our CRM list — those are people who already know our brand. While programmatic helps us find new customers.”


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