"No platform in the world does this." Unlimitail CEO Alexis Marcombe owns the ambition as he presents Social Retail by Unlimitail, a new offer designed to bring retail media and social media closer together.
Concretely, the product aims to improve how audience extension campaigns are run - the off-site activations conducted outside retailers' owned environments. To get there, Unlimitail has built a technology layer meant to make better use of retailer transactional data inside social platforms.
The goal is not simply to do better what already existed. Historically, those activations relied on fairly classic onboarding logic: build audience segments from purchase data, then activate them on the platforms via a third-party data clean room.
With Social Retail, Unlimitail wants to move past that approach and use transactional data as an input signal feeding the platforms' optimisation mechanisms directly. According to Marcombe, that direct integration already reduces leakage and improves match quality compared with traditional setups. "We are looking at a 1 to 10 ratio in terms of efficiency," he says.
But in his view the main benefit lies elsewhere. It is no longer only about identifying, say, the buyers of an FMCG brand from retailer data and then retargeting them. The idea is to inject more granular transactional data into the activation environment so the algorithms themselves determine the most relevant profiles to reach against the business objective.
In other words, purchase data no longer serves only to define a target upfront. It becomes a signal that trains a more dynamic optimisation logic, built both on purchase behaviour observed at the retailer and on the signals social platforms can exploit on their side. "The platforms can help us understand which profiles most closely resemble, at a given moment, the buyers of a product or a consumption universe," Marcombe sums up.
On paper the promise is attractive. Implementing it is heavier than it looks. Marcombe insists in particular on the semantic work needed to make transactional data genuinely understandable to advertising algorithms. Categories, sub-categories, range logic, proximity between SKUs, consistency between products: a whole layer of interpretation is required to turn raw data into a usable signal.
That is what lets Unlimitail present Social Retail as a product in its own right rather than a simple data connection. "The offer is not limited to pushing logs or events into a platform. It rests on interpreting the data, then on the ability to turn it into signals that are useful for delivery, measurement and, eventually, creative optimisation," Marcombe explains.
The creative layer is on the roadmap. Unlimitail says it does not offer DCO in the strict sense at this stage, but is already working on better articulation between targeting, measurement and message adaptation. The idea fits the product's positioning: if data helps identify genuinely relevant profiles, it can also help fine-tune the creative addressed to them.
The launch relies for now on Carrefour data and on Meta, with a first campaign already running in France. The rollout is then due to extend to Brazil and Spain, before opening to other retailers in the Unlimitail portfolio. Longer term the company also hopes to connect the approach to other major social platforms. "We hope to be integrated with every social platform by the end of the year," Marcombe says.
Commercially, Unlimitail presents Social Retail less as a tactical lever than as a steering layer installed for the long run. The offer is built to cover several use cases: product launch, higher basket size, volume gains, upsell or cross-sell. "The goal is to anchor social more firmly in a business-outcomes media logic, rather than purely reach or engagement," Marcombe says.
The announcement lands as audience extension already weighs heavily in Unlimitail's digital business. According to figures shared by the company, it represents around half of its digital revenue, with social and video accounting for a particularly large share.
