Ecommerce business THG – home of brands including LookFantastic, Cult Beauty, and MyProtein – has been on a retail media journey, realising the opportunity over the last few years like many other retailers have.
Last month, this journey led to the development of a dedicated retail media network (RMN) for its beauty business, which was launched in partnership with Zitcha. Integrated into THG Ingenuity, the retailer’s ecommerce solutions arm, THG Beauty Media “offers onsite and offsite, and our solutions are available for full-funnel impact from discovery all the way through to conversion. This includes ad solutions across onsite display, email, media, PLP – powered by Criteo, all enriched with our data to ensure we have that precision,” said Rachel Moss, Retail Media Director – Beauty Business at THG Beauty Media, speaking at Mad//Fest London 2025 with Alexia Nakad, VP Brands and Commerce Media UK & MEA at LiveRamp.
Ramping up retail media offering
The next evolution of THG’s beauty-focused RMN is its recently announced partnership with LiveRamp. The partnership will see THG leverage LiveRamp’s Retail Intelligence solution to provide brands with insights into consumer behaviour that can be used for media optimisation and measurement.
“Our previous way of sharing data with our partners, from a retail data perspective, was slightly archaic, and we really wanted to work with a provider that would support us from a platform point of view to enable us to give data back faster to our partners, and also more detail, because the devil is in the detail. Obviously, that unlocks a lot more beyond what we’re currently from a retail media standpoint,” said Moss.
“Working with LiveRamp has enabled us to give 300% more data, four times faster, to our brand partners.”
However, getting buy-in internally wasn’t entirely straightforward and, even once that was achieved, THG had an uphill battle making sure everything was organised.
“Internally, it was super challenging. Our business hasn’t previously invested so heavily in martech around our retail media proposition, so getting all stakeholders engaged to understand the value of what we’re trying to do and how it was going to benefit the brands was my first priority,” explained Moss. “Once we achieved that, because the business case was so clear, we then had to go through all of the effort of organising our data, which was a huge challenge, and did take some time.
“Once we got all of the data organised into a place where it could feed into LiveRamp efficiently, it enabled us to start that project and really kick off retail media Insights as a proposition, and also the measurement piece as well.”
This also meant beginning to invest in the team to ensure that the right technical expertise was in place, because “when you start this off as a project, you’ll soon realise that having that insights person to support you is the most key thing to really get it off the ground,” Moss added.
For those looking to start on a similar journey to THG, Moss advises starting with clear goals and have a focus on working with trustworthy partners.
“It’s about making sure you choose a provider that you really trust to deliver what you need them to deliver, and you’re really clear on what you’re going into before you sign the contract and spend quite a lot of money on,” said Moss.
“Before you start the journey, get somebody that can support you on the integration. The integration has been one of the most challenging parts of it for us as a business, especially because our data wasn’t in the right place prior to starting this project.”
*LiveRamp is a client of Bluestripe Communications, owned by Bluestripe Group, publisher of RMA
