Scaling luxury performance with real-time data

JAKALA partnered with a leading global luxury fashion house, renowned for its heritage of craftsmanship and timeless design across fashion, accessories, fragrances, and cosmetics.

The brand already had a solid data foundation in place. Customer and product data were centralized in Databricks, operating as a single source of truth at global scale. What was missing was the final step: turning that intelligence into fast, precise activation across paid media, especially during peak campaign periods when performance and brand experience matter most.

Together with JAKALA, the brand set out to close that gap, elevating media efficiency while protecting the standards expected from a luxury experience.

From strong data to real activation: the challenge

Peak campaign moments concentrate a huge share of annual media investment into short, high-pressure windows. For a global luxury brand operating across regions and platforms, those moments require speed, consistency, and flawless execution.

While the data strategy was mature, activation was not there yet. Audiences had to be built manually, uploaded repeatedly into multiple ad platforms, and refreshed by hand across regions. Suppression of recent purchasers was slow and inconsistent, leading to wasted spend and, at times, ads that felt mistimed or irrelevant to customers.

The same operational friction limited growth initiatives. High-quality first-party data existed, but building and maintaining lookalike audiences at scale required constant manual effort, reducing effectiveness precisely when efficient acquisition mattered most.

As a result, teams lost time, duplicated work, and struggled to keep audiences fresh during the most critical campaigns.

The brand had a clear ambition to activate first-party data across paid media, but everything was happening manually. Without a way to easily include or suppress audiences, they were losing time, duplicating effort across regions, and risking wasted ad spend.

- Antonio Armenia, Partner and Market Leader, JAKALA

The strategic choice: operationalizing Databricks, not replacing it

JAKALA played a central role in defining the activation model. As a long-term partner, JAKALA had already supported the brand in building its Databricks-based data lake, designed to scale globally and support advanced customer intelligence.

The question was not only about changing strategy, but also about changing execution: how to activate warehouse data across paid media without slowing teams down, duplicating data, or introducing unnecessary complexity.

Instead of a traditional CDP, often associated with long implementation cycles and data replication, JAKALA recommended a composable CDP approach, allowing the brand to activate data directly from Databricks.

They already had a strong data lake in Databricks and wanted to keep it as their single source of truth. What they needed was a way to activate that data quickly, without a long CDP implementation or duplicating data into another system.

- Iacopo Amicabile, Head of Marketing Data Science and Martech, JAKALA

The solution: Hightouch as the activation layer

JAKALA selected Hightouch as the activation layer on top of Databricks, enabling the brand to move directly from warehouse intelligence to live audiences across paid media platforms.

JAKALA led the full orchestration:

defining the activation strategy
modeling customer and product signals
designing the audience framework for suppression, retargeting, and lookalikes

With this setup, audiences could be continuously refreshed and activated across regions and channels, without manual uploads or engineering bottlenecks.

In justover six weeks, the brand was live and ready for a critical peak campaign window.

Marketing teams could now:

automatically suppress recent purchasers
retarget users based on real product and category interactions
build stronger lookalike audiences using high-value customer signals
launch campaigns consistently across platforms and regions

Because the data foundation was already in place, we were able to model the data, setup Hightouch, and activate audiences in just over a month. That speed was critical as campaign timelines tightened.

- Giuseppe Iovino, Marketing Data Science Manager, JAKALA

From manual execution to scalable activation

Before the project, paid media relied on manual CSV uploads, fragmented audience logic, and slow refresh cycles. After the transformation:

audiences sync automatically from Databricks to Meta and Google Ads, with expansion to DV360 and TikTok
marketers self-serve suppression, retargeting, and lookalikes from a single source of truth
recent purchasers are excluded in real time, protecting the premium experience
teams move from idea to live, warehouse-powered audiences in 3–6 weeks

Crucially, data remains in Databricks, meeting strict governance and privacy requirements.

Measurable impact during the moments that matter most

Bya ctivating conversion and purchase data directly from the warehouse, the brand reduced wasted spend and improved relevance across campaigns. High-intent shoppers were retargeted based on real behavior, while lookalike audiences benefited from stronger, cleaner seed lists.

The results were immediate and measurable:

double digit reduction in cost per action (CPA) during peak campaigns
Six-figure savings on seven-figure media spend
Real-time activation with no manual uploads
A more consistent and premium customer experience

Hightouch allowed the marketing team to work directly with warehouse data to build suppression, retargeting, and lookalike audiences, without relying on manual uploads or constant support from data engineers. By activating first-party data more effectively, the brand saw CPA reductions in the 15–20% range, translating into six-figure savings during their most important campaign periods.

- Antonio Armenia, Partner and Market Leader, JAKALA Digital & Media

Looking ahead: from paid media to omnichannel activation

With a composable CDP now embedded in its data infrastructure, the brand is expanding its ambitions. Future initiatives include identity resolution, improved match rates, richer CRM journeys, and more advanced omnichannel personalization, extending the same warehouse-driven logic beyond paid media.