MIXX Awards Europe 2025 Gold winners: How Coca-Cola and Unlimitail turned transactional data into incremental growth

‍Unlimitail is proud to announce a MIXX Awards Europe 2025 Gold win in the Retail & Commerce Media category, alongside Coca-Cola, Carrefour and MediaCom, for: “Coca-Cola & Unlimitail: Data-Driven Offsite Retail Media that Delivers Real Incremental Sales.”

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The MIXX Awards Europe, organised by IAB Europe, celebrate campaigns that set the bar for digital marketing across Europe, where strategy, creativity and performance are judged side by side. Among this year’s winners, Unlimitail is honoured to see this work recognised as a benchmark for what Retail Media can deliver when it is built for business impact and used to its full extent. Explore the full list of awarded campaigns here.

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Growth is the new brief: recruit, retain, and prove what’s incremental

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Retail media is entering its most demanding chapter. Objectives vary by brand, but expectations are rising: more performance, more relevance, and clearer proof. At Unlimitail, we build growth strategies that connect branding and conversion and answer the key question that validates impact: was it truly incremental?

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For Coca-Cola, the ambition was clear: drive growth through a twofold approach : strengthening loyalty among existing buyers while recruiting new shoppers in the soft drinks category. Delivering both at scale takes more than broad targeting: it requires precision, orchestration, and measurement you can stand behind.

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Turning transactional data into a growth engine

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The foundation of the strategy was Carrefour’s transactional data, offering a granular view of real purchase behaviour at scale. Turning transaction signals into precise consumer segments based on what drives growth: purchase frequency and volume.

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That approach enabled the creation of nearly 90 distinct audiences - heavy buyers, occasionals, slowing consumers, at-risk profiles - mapped across Coca-Cola’s brand portfolio (Coca-Cola, Fanta, Fuze Tea, Tropico, etc). Each audience represented a different opportunity and therefore required a different balance of pressure, message and timing.

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A dual rhythm designed for performance: Always-on + Brand Moments

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To make the strategy both scalable and relevant over time, the activation relied on two complementary engines:

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Always-on waves, spanning over periods of 3 to 9 months, sustained brand presence and nurtured loyalty with calibrated pressure. This “useful repetition” prevented saturation among heavy buyers already close to the brands, while reallocating budget toward profiles that needed more contacts to convert.

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Alongside that, Brand Moments waves spanning periods of 1 to 3 months, capitalised on Coca-Cola’s key commercial periods (such as Halloween or the Olympic Games) to recruit soft drink buyers who were not yet purchasing the brand. These shorter bursts used higher intensity when it mattered most, maximising the recruitment opportunity.

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Importantly, loyalty and recruitment strategies ran in parallel, relying on carefully differentiated and isolated segments. This maintained message relevance, avoided overexposure or audiences overlaps, and ensured measurement remained clean and actionable.

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Offsite execution, built for conversion

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All activations were delivered across the open web in a brand-safe environment, defined with Coca-Cola to ensure secure and controlled delivery. The IAB formats used in the campaign consistently drove users back to Carrefour.fr, connecting media exposure to real purchase intent.

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But sophistication didn’t stop at targeting and pacing. Creativity played a central role in keeping the strategy effective throughout the year. In 2024, Coca-Cola produced 24 creative variations, tailored to key segments (loyalty, recruitment, at-risk…) and brand moments. This granular creative approach aligned media strategy and execution - building both attention and efficiency at scale.

Independent measurement, focused on incrementality

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This case is “data-driven” not only because it uses transactional data to target, but because it uses a robust methodology to prove impact.

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The plan was independently measured by Numsight using a lift-test methodology (exposed vs. non-exposed). This enabled precise quantification of the campaign’s impact on sales and confirmed that results were truly incremental, meaning those sales would not have been achieved without the activation.

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And the results speak for themselves, over one year, the activation delivered:

• 11.5 million contacts reached
• 267 million impressions
• €1.6M+ in incremental revenue

Those results demonstrate more than performance, they show how deep consumer knowledge can change your business. Loyal consumers were reinforced without oversaturation, while new buyers were recruited through calibrated pressure designed to convert. This is full-funnel retail media with accountability at every step.

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Why this case won?

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In our view, this campaign stood out because it brings together the pillars that define best-in-class Retail & Commerce Media today:

• It delivers precision at scale, through ultra-granular segmentation (nearly 90 audiences) and differentiated pacing.
• It drives direct action, by consistently redirecting to Carrefour.fr and tying exposure to purchase outcomes.
• And it establishes a reproducible model, turning transactional data into a durable growth lever.

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Discover the case video:

Recognised two years in a row

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This MIXX Awards Europe 2025 Gold win follows another major recognition for the same work: in 2024, the campaign also won Best Retail Media Activation at the Adtech Awards organised by Minted in France. That continuity matters, it signals a model that performs consistently, across juries and markets, because it is built on fundamentals: segmentation, orchestration, and incrementality. It is a celebration of what retail media can become when data, creativity, and measurement move together - and when growth is engineered with purpose.